Sustainable performance improvement programs depend significantly on analytics and enterprise information management programs.
Todd Christiansen, managing director at Huron Healthcare in Chicago: As healthcare analytics become more common and broadly distributed throughout health systems, the concept of data or information governance becomes more difficult to implement and manage. It is not uncommon for simple terms, such as "length of stay," to have many different definitions utilized throughout a health system. Implementation of integrated business glossary, and business intelligence functionality combined with data lineage capabilities are essential to support scale, adoption and success of analytics throughout the system. Complexity increases as integration of external sources of data (e.g. administrative claims, pharmacy claims or data acquired through health information exchange) become more prevalent. Establishing a strong data governance program should accelerate the development and implementation of self service, speed the decentralization of analytics programs and improve accuracy and measurement of performance.