by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | February 06, 2019
From the January/February 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The issues occurring due to that lack of governance are exacerbated by the steady number of mergers and acquisitions happening in healthcare. Each increases data pileup and multiplies the complexity of the untangling needed to fully benefit from the data being acquired.
Barras said that perhaps the single fundamental premise when it comes to data governance is the mentality that it’s an IT issue. “It’s not an IT issue. It’s a governance issue. IT does not own your data. You do. Your departments do. So you need to find a steward who will fit inside the data structure and make the decisions about how you will aggregate and analyze this data to solve emerging business issues. In other industries, these concepts are well-entrenched, but healthcare is still struggling with it.”
In his estimation, the creation of a data governance team shouldn’t require heavy budget commitments. A big team of full-timers isn’t needed to support it. Rather, it can be a group of people working it part time as something they do in their regular position. “Often, there are already people working on these things, so it’s more a shift in thinking than a shift in responsibilities,” he said.
For those who think they’re already on the right track, Barras offered an anecdote. “When we start talking to potential clients, we’ll typically get a response, ‘hey we do this already, and we think we’re pretty good at it.’ But once you start digging under the covers, you often find that what they think is pretty good is not good at all. What you find is that they’re cutting and pasting a lot of information, usually via spreadsheets, for example.”
That cutting and pasting can lead to redundancy and confusion and it afflicts mature and fledgling health systems alike. “So if we look at length of stay, for instance, very often we’ll see that an organization might have three or four or more definitions. They’re moving the needle by adjusting the definition behind the scenes and cutting and redefining to account for it instead of adopting a master governance plan to uniformly decide what length of stay means for the system.” That problem can be multiplied by hundreds, if not thousands, with all the other multi-definition instances within a single healthcare system. The solution? Data governance.
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