The problem with data governance in the healthcare industry is that it's not important until it's a problem, according to Bruce Darrow, MD, PhD, the chief medical information officer for Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
Dr. Darrow and Deborah Green, the executive vice president and chief innovation and global services officer of the American Health Information Management Association, participated in a panel discussion on data governance during the Becker's Hospital Review CIO/HIT + Revenue Cycle Summit in Chicago July 21. The panel was moderated by Laura Dyrda, editor-in-chief of Becker's ASC Review and Becker's Spine Review.
One of the major challenges associated with data governance in healthcare is that it's not seen as an investment worth making, Dr. Darrow asserted. "It's the vegetables of your meal," he said. "It's essential, but it's hard to get the people who need to recognize its value to place value on it," especially because it has to compete with other, more tangible and easier understood investments.
Because data governance is so essential to healthcare today, Ms. Green suggested one way to raise its profile in any organization: Change its name from data governance to information governance.
"Information has a strategic value, as opposed to data, which has more technical-level value," she said. Changing the name can lead to a necessary change in mindset in many healthcare leaders and a realization that information governance is a strategic imperative.
To build data, or information, governance, up to that strategic imperative level in a hospital or health system, a foundation and some building blocks are necessary.
A challenge to that, according to Dr. Darrow, is that data governance is distributed throughout the organization and different departments need different information on their own timetables.
To help tackle this issue at Mount Sinai, Dr. Darrow said he has a small clinical informatics team with one person on the team assigned to tackle any question that comes up regarding data governance. That way, there is cross-knowledge and standardization across procedures, he said.
Ms. Green agreed with that approach and pushed hospitals to go one step further by putting a data governance framework in place with senior-level backing. Once senior-level leadership is identified, she recommended putting together a data governance team or council to truly raise its profile in an organization. Then, have the team focus on high-priority issues or the biggest pain points in the hospital or health system.
In the end, stakeholders need to communicate with the entire organization about the importance of data and information governance. "Information is so important and its reliability is so important that every type of organization in healthcare with information needs to govern it," Ms. Green said. "It amounts to an ethical obligation."