There are a number of patients whose first claim/lab/drugs have a missing DSFS value. Are those values truly missing or represent 0 days since the first claim?

Deafening silence!!!!

I have spent today on a first look at this competition. I am a little worried by the comments such as this which indicate the quality of the data supplied is not quite what one would expect if HH is serious about this.

I have imported the data into my database system and done some digging, and there appear to be some glaring holes. Why include these obviously corrupt records? Is this what the real database actually contains? Is it intentional noise?

Disappointing.

I work with claims data similar to this (albeit more detailed), and can say that this kind of missing data is not too uncommon.
Some of it has to do with the source - records of this kind often have to be pieced together from many other records. However, I wouldn't expect HH to have much trouble with this, due to their claims system being a closed set.

Another source of missing values is federal law. In the data I work with, for example, there are many patients with a null DOB. This is because HIPAA requires the DOB in data like these to be nullified for all patients over 80 years old. I never really deal with inpatient hospital claims, but there may be similar rules.