Glossary
The vocabulary of data trust.
Plain definitions for the terms this field keeps using loosely. Each one is written to stand on its own, and each one links to where the concept runs in production.
Data Trust Index (DTI)
The Data Trust Index (DTI) is an eight-dimensional scoring framework, developed by SuperTruth Inc., that evaluates health data records on a 0 to 100 scale. It is the authorization step for health data: per record, in the moment, the score that decides whether data can be trusted for a given use. The score travels permanently with every record, so any model, clinician, or auditor downstream can see how much the record deserves to be trusted.
Clearing house (the Visa sense)
SuperTruth is the clearing house for health data in the Visa sense, not the claims sense. Visa does not lend you money and never holds your account; it decides in the moment whether a transaction can be trusted, and it keeps the record. DTI is the authorization step, the Ledger is the clearing, and Truth Units are the settlement.
Data trust vs. data quality
Data quality asks whether a record is complete, correctly formatted, and free of errors. Data trust asks a harder set of questions: where did this data come from, was consent obtained properly, how current is it, does it corroborate with independent sources, and has it been validated against outcomes. A record can be perfectly clean and completely untrustworthy.
Provenance
Provenance is the documented origin and chain of custody of a data record: which source produced it, under what conditions, and every hand it passed through on the way to the point of use. In the Data Trust Index, provenance is the heaviest-weighted dimension at 25%, because a value that cannot say where it came from cannot be defended in front of a clinician, a regulator, or a court.
Consent revocation
Consent revocation is a patient's withdrawal of permission for their health data to be used, and the hard engineering problem is propagation: every downstream system that holds or derives from the record has to honor the withdrawal, immediately and provably. In SuperTruth's ConsentOS, revocation propagates downstream the moment it is made, and every consent event lands in an immutable, hash-chained audit log.
Zero-copy architecture
Zero-copy architecture verifies and scores data where it already lives instead of copying it into another vendor's warehouse. The record stays inside the institution's environment; only the verified signal, the score, the provenance, and the answer, travels.
Temporal drift
Temporal drift is the decay of a data record's accuracy over time. A medication list from 2019, an address from a prior enrollment, or last quarter's risk factor may be dangerously wrong today while still looking perfectly clean. Data does not announce that it has expired.
Schema drift
Schema drift is a data source changing its field names, types, codes, or units without telling the systems downstream. The record still arrives and still looks clean; it just no longer means what the pipeline assumes it means. A renamed column, a lab that switches from mg/dL to mmol/L, or a code set that moves versions all count.
Semantic drift
Semantic drift is the same field coming to mean something different over time. A lab changes its assay method, a diagnosis is recoded under a new guideline, a wearable updates the algorithm behind a metric, and the values keep flowing under the old name with a new meaning.
Provenance gap
A provenance gap is a record whose origin or chain of custody cannot be shown: who produced it, when, from what source, and through which hands it passed before it reached you. The record may be accurate. Nobody can prove it.
Federated query
A federated query runs a research question across multiple institutions' data without moving any of the data. The query travels to where each record lives, and what returns is the answer with its provenance, never the records themselves. Clean Rooms handle the cross-institutional work so no participant sees another's raw data.
AI data governance
AI data governance is the set of controls that decides what data an AI system is allowed to learn from and act on: where each record came from, whether consent covers the use, how current the value is, and whether the answer can be defended after the fact. SuperTruth implements it as an authorization step: every record is scored 0 to 100 before anything downstream touches it, and records below the floor never enter the model.
Data lineage
Data lineage is the map of how a value moved and changed inside your systems: which pipelines transformed it, which tables it landed in, which reports consumed it. Provenance is the stronger claim underneath it: which real-world source produced the value in the first place, and under what conditions. Lineage tells you the path; provenance tells you whether the starting point deserves belief.
Consent management
Consent management is the discipline of knowing, for every health record, what the patient agreed to, for which purposes, for how long, and honoring changes immediately. In SuperTruth's ConsentOS, consent is verified in real time at the moment of use rather than assumed from a signature collected once, and consent is a scored dimension of every record: 20% of its Data Trust Index.