If you've ever worked on a healthcare data team, you've lived this problem: one system calls it mem_id, another calls it member_number, a third calls it subscriber_key — and they all mean the exact same thing.
Multiply that across claims, clinical, provider, pharmacy, and finance domains, and you get a data warehouse where nobody fully trusts a join without checking three wikis and pinging someone on Slack first.
I got tired of solving this problem from scratch on every project, so I built a standardized healthcare data dictionary — and I'm open-sourcing a sample of it.
The Core Idea: ISO-11179
ISO-11179 is an international standard for metadata registries — basically, a formal way to define data elements so that "Member Identifier" means the same thing, has the same data type, and follows the same naming convention no matter which system, team, or analyst is touching it.
