Category Archives: USA IQ Train Wrecks

Kid from 6th Sense works on Economic Stimulus – he stimulates dead people

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The bad joke in the headline aside, this story (which comes to us via Initiate Systems on Twitter, who linked to it from WBALTV in Baltimore USA) reveals a common type of IQ Trainwreck – the “sending things to dead people” problem.

As we know, the US Government has been sending out Stimulus Cheques (or Checks, if you are in the US) to people to help stimulate consumer spending in the US economy. Kind of like a defibrillator for consumer confidence.

Initiate Systems picked up on the story of a cheque that was sent to Mrs Rose Hagner. Her son found it in the mail and was a bit surprised when he saw it. After all, he’s 83 years old and his mother has been dead for over 40 years. Social Security officials give the following explanation:

Of the about 52 million checks that have been mailed out, about 10,000 of those have been sent to people who are deceased.

The agency blames the error on the strict mid-June deadline of mailing out all of the checks, which didn’t leave officials much time to clean up all of their records.

Of course, one might ask why this was such a challenge when the issue raised its head in 2008 as well when a cheque was mailed to a man in Georgia which was made out to a Mr George Croker DECD (an abbreviation for deceased). The story, which was picked up by SmartPros.com at the time (and for the life of us we can’t see how it slipped under our radar), describes the situation as follows:

Richard Hicks, a Fulton County magistrate, says the $600 check arrived in Roswell this week and was made out to George A. Coker DECD, which, of course, stands for “deceased.”

Coker obviously won’t be able to do his bit to spur the consumer economy, which has Hicks puzzled and somewhat miffed.

“There’s a $9 trillion national debt and our government’s giving away money to dead people,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “As a taxpayer, it offends the hell out of me.”

The Internal Revenue Service in Atlanta told the newspaper it didn’t know how many other DECD checks have been written nationwide since the 2007 returns are still being processed.

So, the issue has existed since at least 2008 and relates to data being used for a new purpose (sending cheques on a blanket basis). It would seem the solution that is being attempted is to inspect the errors out of the cheque batches before they are sent by the June dead-line. A better solution might be to:

  1. Apply some business rules to the process, for example “If recipient is older than 120 then verify – as the oldest person in the world is currently 115), or parse the name string to determine which social security records end with “DECD” or any other standard variant abbreviation for “deceased”.
  2. Embed these checks (not cheques) into the process for managing the master data set rather than applying them at ‘point of use’.

Building quality into a process, and into the information produced by and consumed by a process, reduces the risk of embarrassing information quality errors. Cleaning and correcting errors or exceptions as a bulk batch process is not as value-adding as actually improving your processes to prevent poor quality information being created or being acted on.

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

Well, the volumes of records affected and the actual cost are quite low so one could argue that the information is “close enough for government work”. However, government work tends to get political and a google search on this topic has thrown up a lot of negative political comment from opponents of the stimulus plan.

The volume and actual cost may be low, but the likely impact in terms of PR impact and time that might be required to explain the issue in the media highlights the often overlooked cost and impact of poor quality information – reputation and credibility.

These are the IQ trainwrecks in your neighbourhood

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Stumbled upon this lovely pictorial IQTrainwreck today on Twitter. Thanks to Angela Hall (@sasbi) for taking the time to snap the shot and tweet it and for giving us permission to use it here. As Angela says on her Twitpic tweet:

Data quality issue in the neighborhood? How many street signs (with diff names) are needed? Hmmmm

Data quality issue in the neighborhood? How many street signs... on Twitpic In the words of Bob Dylan: “How many roads must a man walk down?”

Google Health – Dead on Arrival due to duff data quality?

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It would seem that poor quality information has caused some definitely embarassing and potentially risky outcomes in Google’s new on-line Patient Health Record service. The story has featured (amongst other places) :

  • Here (Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe)
  • Here  (InformationWeek.com’s Global CIO Blog)

‘Patient Zero’ for this story was this blog post by “e-patient Dave” over at e-patient.net. In this blog post “e-Patient Dave” shared his experiences migrating his personal health records over to Google Health. To say that the quality of the information that was transferred was poor is an understatement. Amongst other things:

Yes, ladies and germs, it transmitted everything I’ve ever had. With almost no dates attached.

So, to someone looking at e-Patient Dave’s medical records in Google Health it would appear that his middle name might be Lucky as he had every ailment he’s ever had… at the same time.

Not only that, for the item where dates did come across on the migration, there were factual errors in the data. For example, the date given for e-Patient Dave’s cancer diagnosis was out by four months. To cap things off, e-patient Dave tells us that:

The really fun stuff, though, is that some of the conditions transmitted are things I’ve never had: aortic aneurysm and mets to the brain or spine.

The root cause that e-Patient Dave uncovered by talking to some doctors was that the migration process transferred billing code data rather than actual diagnostic data to Google Health. As readers of Larry English’s Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality will know, the quality of that data isn’t always *ahem* good enough. As English tells us:

An insurance company discovered from its data warehouse, newly loaded with claims data, that 80% of the claims from one region were paid for a claim with a medical diagnosis code of  “broken leg”. Was that region a rough neighborhood? No, claims processors were measured on how fast they paid claims, rather than for accurate claim information. Only needing a “valid diagnosis code” to pay a claim, they frequently allowed the system to default to a value of “broken leg”.

(Historical note: while this example features in Larry’s book, it originally featured in an article he wrote for DM-Review (now Information-Management.com) back in 1996.)

“e-patient Dave” adds another wrinkle to this story..

[i]f a doc needs to bill insurance for something and the list of billing codes doesn’t happen to include exactly what your condition is, they cram it into something else so the stupid system will accept it.) (And, btw, everyone in the business is apparently accustomed to the system being stupid, so it’s no surprise that nobody can tell whether things are making any sense: nobody counts on the data to be meaningful in the first place.)

To cap it all off, a lot of the key data that e-Patient Dave expected to see transferred wasn’t there, and of what was transferred the information was either inaccurate or horridly incomplete:

  • what they transmitted for diagnoses was actually billing codes
  • the one item of medication data they sent was correct, but it was only my current BP med. (Which, btw, Google Health said had an urgent conflict with my two-years-ago potassium condition, which had been sent without a date). It sent no medication history, not even the fact that I’d had four weeks of high dosage Interleukin-2, which just MIGHT be useful to have in my personal health record, eh?
  • the allergies data did NOT include the one thing I must not ever, ever violate: no steroids ever again (e.g. cortisone) (they suppress the immune system), because it’ll interfere with the immune treatment that saved my life and is still active within me. (I am well, but my type of cancer normally recurs.)

    • So, it would seem that information quality problems that have been documented in the information quality literature for over a decade are at the root of an embarassing information quality trainwreck that could (potentially) have an affect on how a patient might be treated at a new hospital – considering they have all these ailments at once but appear asypmtomatic. To cap it all off, failures in the mapping of critical data resulted in an electronic patient record that was dangerously inaccurate and incomplete.

    Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House

    Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House

    What would Dr. Gregory House make of e-Patient Dave’s notes?

    e-Patient Dave’s blog post makes interesting reading (and at 2800 words + covers a lot of ground). He details a number of other reasons why quality problems exist in electronic patient records and why :

    • nobody’s in the habit of actually fixing errors. (he cites an x-ray record that shows him to be a female)
    • processes for data integrity in healthcare are largely absent, by ordinary business standards. I suspect there are few, if any, processes in place to prevent wrong data from entering the system, or tracking down the cause when things do go awry.
    • Data doesn’t seem to get transferred consistently from paper forms to electronic records (specficially e-Patient Dave’s requirement not to have steriods).
    • Lack of sufficient edit controls and governance over data and patient records, including audit trails.

    e-Patient Dave is at pains to make it clear that the problem isn’t with Google Health. The problem is with the data that was migrated across to Google Health from his existing electronic patient record.

    Google Health – DOA after an IQ Trainwreck.?

    Trusted Electoral Information

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    Introduction

    Warning – this is a long and detailed examination of a complicated trainwreck

    [Update] The IAIDQ has issued a press release on this topic…Election Throws A Spotlight On Poor Data Quality. [/update]

    In every democracy citizens must be able to trust that the State will not impede their right to vote through any act or omission on the part of the State or its agents. Regular visitors to the iqtrainwrecks.info blog will know that Ireland has it’s fair share of problems with its electoral register. Of course, that isn’t news.

    However, the Washington Post has reported last weekend (18th October) that the US elections are being plagued by similar issues. The New York Times covers the same ground in this story from 9th October. With a slightly important vote coming up on the 4th of November, that is news

    In a saga that has found its way to the US Supreme Court (in at least one case so far), voters are being forced to re-establish their eligibility to vote before the election on November 4th. As the Post points out, “many voters may not know that their names have been flagged” which could “cause added confusion on Election Day”.

    So what is going on (apart from the lawyers getting richer of the inevitable law suits and voters finding themselves reduced to just “Rs” as they lose their Vote)? Where is the trust being lost? Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

    A Change of Process and a Migration of Data

    Under the Help America Vote Act, responsibility for the management of electoral registers was moved from locally managed (i.e. county level) to state administered. This has been trumpeted as a more efficient and accurate way to manage the accuracy of electoral lists. After all, the states also have the driver licensing data, social welfare data and other data sources to use to validate that a voter is a voter and not a gold fish.

    However, where discrepancies arise between the information on the voter registration and other official records, the voter registration is rejected. And as anyone who has dealt with ‘officialdom’ can testify to, very often those errors are outside the control of the ‘data subject’ (in this case the voter). The legislation requires election officials to use the state databases first, with recourse to the Federal databases (such as social security) supposedly reserved as a ‘last resort’ because ,according the the New York Times, “using the federal databases is less reliable than the state lists and is more likely to incorrectly flag applications as invalid”.

    Of course, for a comment on the accuracy of state databases I’ve found this story on The Risks Digest which seems to sum things up (however, as a caveat I’ll point out that the story is 10 years old, but my experience is that when crappy data gets into a system it’s hard to get it out). In the linked-to story, the author (living in the US) tells of her experience with her drivers license which insisted on merging her first initial and middle name (the format she prefers to use) to create a new non-name that didn’t match her other details. That error then propagated onto her tax information and appeared on a refund cheque she received.

    In short, it would seem she might have a problem voting (if her drivers license and tax records haven’t been corrected since).

    Accuracy of Master Data, and consistency of Master Data

    The anecdote above highlights the need for accuracy in the master data that the voter lists are being validated against. For example, the Washington Post article cites the example of Wisconsin, which flags voters data discrepancies “as small as a middle initial or a typo in a birth date”.

    I personally don’t use the apostrophe in my surname. I’m O Brien, not O’Brien. Also, you can spell my first name over a dozen different ways (not counting outright errors). A common alternate spelling is Darragh, as opposed to Daragh. It looks like that in Wisconsin I’d have high odds of joining the four members of their 6-strong state elections board who all failed validation due to mismatches on data.

    In Alabama, there is a constitutional ban on people convicted of felony crimes of “moral turpitude” voting. The Governor’s Office has issued one masterlist of 480 offences, which included “disrupting a funeral” as a felony. The Courts Administrator and Attorney General issued a second list of more violent crimes to be used in the voter validation process. Unfortunately, it seems that the Governor’s list was used until very recently instead of the more ‘lenient’ list provided by the Courts Administrator.

    Combine this with problems with the accuracy of other master data, such as lists of people who were convicted of the aforementioned felonies and there is a recipe for disenfranchisement. Which is exactly what has happened to a former governor (a Republican at that) called Guy Hunt.

    In 1993 Mr Hunt had been convicted of a felony related to ethics violations He received a pardon in 1998. In 2008 his name was included on a “monthly felons check” sent to a county Registrar. Mr Hunt’s name shouldn’t have been on the list.

    According to the Washington Post article, Mr Hunt isn’t the only person who was included on the felon list. 40% of the names on the list seen by the Washington Post had only committed misdemeanors. In short, the information was woefully inaccurate.

    But it is being used to de-register voters and deprive them of their right tohave their say on the 4th November.

    The Washington Post also cites cases where US citizens have been flagged as non-citizens (and therefore not entitled to vote) due to problems with social security numbers. Apparently some election officials have found the social security systems to be “not 100% accurate”. But this is the reason why they are supposed only to be used when the state systems on their own are insufficient to verify the voter. That’s the law（apparently).

    Continue reading →

    Flight booking boo boos

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    So, I’m booking my flights to the IDQ 2008 conference in San Antonio. I’m flying with Continental.

    As with most airlines I have to provide a contact telephone number for them to contact me before, during or after travel.Their website allows me to select the country that my phone number is in. My phone number is an Irish one (my cell phone drinks, fights and bleaches its hair to pretend to be Alexander the Great, just like Colin Farrell.)

    So I selected my country and enter my phone number (087-63xxxxx).Continental present this back to me as 01108763xxxxx. So I go again, putting in 00353, +353 and all other variants I can think of.

    Continental comes back to me with variants on a 011-[long string of garbage] telephone number.

    So. What happens when Continental try to ring me when I’m away? Why have they wasted my time submitting (and resubmitting) this information over and over again when they simply bugger it up on me? Why, regardless of what country I select do Continental want me to live in America?I think I’ll ring some of the variants that Continental spat out to me and see who answers…. 

    It’s the end of the world as we know it… or is it?

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    Yahoo is today carrying a story from AFP about a 13 year old German school boy who has corrected NASA’s calculations on the probability of ‘planet killer’ asteroid Apophis crashing into earth and causing a global catastrophe. The wunder-kind in question did his analysis as part of a regional science competition.

    It seems that NASA forgot to factor in the affect of Apophis hitting one or more of the numerous satellites that orbit the earth in close proximity to the path the Asteroid will take on its next pass past the Earth in 2029. Apparently, if it hits a satellite the odds of Apophis hitting the earth in 2036 drop from a lottery-like 1 in 45,000 to a more troubling 1 in 450.

    The IQ issue here is completeness of information. NASA failed to take into account the satellites in its risk model, resulting in a whopping understatement of the risk to the planet.

    The short-term IQ Trainwreck comes about because the NASA scientists were corrected by a 13 year old. The long term IQ Trainwreck comes about because the 1 in 45,000 odds are probably firmly fixed in the minds of disaster recover planners around the world giving rise to degree of complacency, whereas a 1 in 450 risk might prompt some consolidated efforts to figure out how to properly manage the risk of Apophis hitting the earth or handling the ensuing global catastrophe.

    However, more recent reports this afternoon suggest that the wunderkind may be a blunder-kind and may have based his model on some incorrect assumptions about the path of the asteroid. Oh dear.

    In any event, the fact that a teenager is interested in this and that he researched the possiblity of the risks is commendable. Hopefully someone will take the time to reassess his work and determine if he is wrong or just not as right as he thought, improving the accuracy of the prediction models for Apophis.

    Good quality information can help save the planet.  Poor quality information can send people unnecessarily into a panic.

    Super Tuesday – Gloomy e-voting Wednesday

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    The Register has highlighted not one but two potential information quality problems with the ballots being cast in the pre-Presidential primaries in the US.

    Firstly, Democrats Abroad decided to support Democrats living overseas by letting them vote on-line. This sounds like an excellent idea, this ‘electronic voting’. However, there seem to have been some concerns with the way the ballot was conducted. Apparently the ‘receipt’ that was produced to evidence the voter’s choice just showed the choice, with no other reference that could be used to support an audit. And to cap things off, when one voter tried to print her ‘receipt’ all she got was a blank sheet of paper.

    David Dill and Barbara Simons are two experts in the field who wrote a nice piece on this precise risk on Monday over on www.news.com

    Of course, it’s not just internet voting that is all a-jitter. With electronic voting being a much used technology in the US, it was timely that a report was issued by two voting advocacy groups that highlighted that six of the twenty four (25%) States are at high risk of malfunction of or tampering with their e-voting machines , with a further 5  States being at medium risk. That’s almost 50%.

    Sheesh. It’s a good job that the stakes are so low with that level of risk in the process and with the audit trails not really being audit trails and the receipts printing out blank.

    It is, after all, only a race for the Presidency of the United States. Surely the expectation of accuracy and completeness in those ballot counts will be low?

    Home Removals – literally.

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    Fox News has this story from the AP Newswire today.

    It seems a Russian woman returned from a visit to the country to find that her city home was gone, demolished by mistake by over-eager builders who were supposed to be tearing down a different building.

    Ooops.

    Of course, errors in demolition can only happen in Mother Russia. Surely.

    Apparently not. Looking back to August of last year, it seems that in the US, there is a bit of a muddle in New Orleans about what buildings damaged in Hurricane Katrina should be on the demolition list. According to Associated Press/MSNBC,

    “Homes that were only damaged have wound up on a list of 1,700 condemned properties. Some houses on the list have been gutted for rebuilding or are in move-in condition”.

    According to a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, there have been cases of ‘do not demolish’ notices issued for buildings that they’ve already bulldozed because they were on the ‘demolish’ list.

    The American Bar Association also picked up on this issue in August last year (which means the lawyers are circling… always a sign of a trainwreck). And in a case cited in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) a homeowner was told by city employees that their home wasn’t on the demolition list and then, effectively, went home to find it demolished after she had spent money clearing the property for renovation and rebuilding.

    My grandfather was a master plasterer and carpenter. One of the most important rules of thumb he taught me as a kid was “measure twice, cut once” to avoid waste and rework. Does that rule apply to demolitions as well?

    Dream host, Billing Nightmare

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    Courtesy (yet again) of The Register comes this case of poor Information Quality. It seems that US web hosting company DreamHost accidentally overbilled its customers for services due to what has been described as a “fat finger error”.

    Full details of the good intentions that paved the path to this Information Quality Hell can be found on the company’s blog – they are refreshingly honest, if perhaps misreading the seriousness of tone that these type of issues require. Also some questions appear to be still unanswered (like how did some customers get billed twice for future dates). The ‘official story’ can be found on their Status site. On both sites the comments illustrate the impact on their customers.

    Why is this an IQ Trainwreck? Well, by the company’s own admission, nearly every one of their customers has been overbilled. Many of these customers may have incurred additional bank or credit card charges if they have exceed overdraft or credit limit thresholds – which will probably have to be refunded by Dreamhost.

    The root cause – a fat finger that created parameters for manual rebilling checks that were in the future… 2008 was the year keyed in, not 2007. And their billing software did not contain a business rule to either prevent or validate any attempt to bill for a future date.
    Dreamhost fail to identify the need for a proof reading check to ensure that data going into a process (such as dates) fall within reasonable bounds for the process (choosing of course to blame the software). Of course, many of the 415 commenters on their blog have picked up on this simple step that could have avoided this IQ Trainwreck.

    However, Dreamhost’s handling of the situation reveals another ‘cultural’ issue that means that these types of problems will recur. Their focus has not been on the customer – while some may appreciate the jokey tone of their blog post explanation, many of the commenters on their blog have condemned their ‘jokey’ if honest posting about the issue (it is perfectly OK for IQ Trainwrecks to joke about these things – we want people to laugh and then think – ‘oh, that could happen to me’).  As one commenter put it

    “Hey, sorry your rent bounced, but here’s a picture of Homer Simpson and some lulzy hipster prose. Joking around might not be the best technique when you are messing with people’s money”.

    Finally, it is an IQ Trainwreck because Dreamhosts competitors have jumped on the opportunity to steal business from them. One of their competitors has created a discount code for people switching hosting to them from Dreamhost which gives them savings on their hosting costs (with no guarantee they won’t be as clumsy with their billing I suspect).

    This will be a costly one to put right.