The main problem with this effort is statistical. Medical databases are not accurate samples of the population; they are biased in hundreds of ways (doctor X is

The main problem with this effort is statistical. Medical databases are not accurate samples of the population; they are biased in hundreds of ways (doctor X is running a clinic for disease Y, but doesn't see many poor people because of Medicaid issues, etc.). People get excited about these because there is "so much data", but since it isn't collected prospectively, even if we could bulk extract all the data (which we can't, it's a fucking mess) any conclusions we drew would be invalid.