Decision-making in a clinical setting needs comprehensive, accurate and real-time data. In order to better care for patients, researchers and data scientists are innovating around the technology enabling access to key data from electronic health records driving decision-making. NIH’s Sarah Warner, a data scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Section of the Critical Care Medicine Department, discusses the strategies behind the big data efforts helping clinicians understand and improve treatment for critically ill patients, better define granular data elements that make up patient care, and inform public health policy more broadly.