Fraud Approved, Patients Duplicated, Models Broken: The Real Cost of Dirty Data
Dirty Data, Dead Decisions: How Enterprise SAS & R Pipelines Rescue Business Trust Monday Morning — The FDA Escalation Nobody Wanted At 7:42 AM, the escalation email arrived. The subject line was short: URGENT: Enrollment Count Mismatch Detected in Submission Package Inside a global oncology trial, the FDA identified duplicate patient identifiers across two regional data feeds. The enrollment dashboard showed 2,148 patients. Reality? 2,031. A single duplicated patient stream inflated recruitment metrics, altered exposure summaries, and contaminated downstream efficacy tables. Safety percentages shifted. Treatment-arm denominators changed. Executive dashboards were wrong. Statistical assumptions cracked. By noon, clinical operations blamed programming. Programming blamed data management. Data management blamed the vendor feed. The vendor blamed "legacy mapping inconsistencies." Meanwhile, regulators didn't care whose fault it was. The submissio...