As the UPMC Health System builds out its analytics capabilities, an initiative now in its third year, it's started a formal data governance program, according to an article at Healthcare Informatics.
Although the health system has been collecting a wealth of information in its data warehouse, much of it was in "note bloat," Vivek Reddy, M.D., chief medical information officer in UPMC's Health Services Division, says in the article. That note bloat makes it hard to define the prevalence of clinical conditions, which creates problems in trying to use the data for research and personalized medicine, he adds.
To fix that problem, UPMC created a data governance council to formalize and standardize the use of data across the organization. It went after low-hanging fruit first, Reddy says, focusing on mundane issues such as data definitions, where data is sent and how to send data to different places.
Those steps have required key clinical leaders to own the definitions of certain diseases or data elements, to know where the data is coming from and where it will go into other business and clinical processes.
Many organizations start out with an idealistic notion of standardizing their data, but they develop bad habits as they seek to speed up the process, Reddy says.
"I really think the corner-cutting method, especially since we're dealing with healthcare data, is one that's easy to do, when one is looking to get to a finish line. But the reality is that these shortcuts will actually create a significant amount of rework and will reduce the amount of confidence you end up with," he says.
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, along with UPMC, created a Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, which is committed to creating new data-based innovations. UPMC says it improved patient outcomes and saved $15 million in medical costs through its data analytics program and a pilot project using patient-centered medical homes.
In addition, the American Health Information Management Association has been stressing the importance of data governance in healthcare. AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon told Hospitals & Health Networks that future success will "boil down to who has the best data" and what's being done with it.
To learn more:
- read the article