[reyntime]

Absolutely. I've been employed in healthcare IT for the last 5 years, doing data extracts for researchers and reporting. Many people don't quite appreciate the underlying complexities of extracting data from not only large EMR systems such as Cerner (with over 6000 schema-less tables), but integrating that with the countless other systems the hospital employs for things such as radiology, pathology, ICD-coding, etc. Many data aren't entered as you would expect, documentation is often lacking and there are very few people who can tell you where exactly the data sits, and how data is actually entered by medical staff doing various work all across the campuses. A simple research request becomes immensely complex when multiple systems are involved and you're using something as complex and as evolving as health data.

So I agree that while this tool may be handy for some, the real challenge with this sort of work is knowing where the (often unstructured) data sits, how it's entered and by whom, and how to extract meaning from it.