Many think that patient care is at the heart of any medical center or health delivery organization. While that may be true, what is also true is that at its core, these are organizations that are largely run based on the data they produce. Not only is the data produced in these organizations for clinical care, but the same data is also at the heart of the healthcare ecosystem. Enormous contracts between the healthcare providing organization, insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, life science companies, and more are based on the data and the analytics that are performed on these data. This talk will outline the creation and flow of data in the healthcare ecosystem. We will describe how these data are used by any number of secondary uses to drive financial as well as healthcare related decision making. We will also discuss some of the core caveats that need to be taken into account based upon how these data are generated, stewarded, and used. This basic understanding can help those entering into or working in the ecosystem to better comprehend not only the value of this data, but how it’s used, by whom, and for what purposes.