Health data stewards are keepers of tribal knowledge, and they’re invaluable when a health system launches or expands a healthcare data analytics initiative. Their intimate and expansive knowledge of how data is collected to represent workflow across different systems can save days’ worth of time (and cost) in the development process while improving the accuracy of the analytics output. But getting anything more than a few spare moments of their time can be difficult because health data stewardship isn’t part of their job description. While it may seem difficult to justify at first, organizations need to formalize the role of the health data steward. The investment will ultimately return many times its value as the organization realizes the advantage of the analytics.