Millions of important pieces of health information are entered into systems of record daily. Without an information governance play book, we are asking our patients to take a trust fall with their health. How confident are you that this is the single source of truth and care is being accurately reflected?
Data has become the vital component against which all things are measured— from determining short-term efficacy to developing long-range strategies. As a result, a new role is emerging in many industries, the Data Quality Officer (DQO), who is entrusted with ensuring data health, analyzing trends, and deriving actionable insights from the information. While this role may be new to Fortune 500 companies, its core competencies have existed in healthcare for years, championed by health information management (HIM) professionals.
In healthcare, data has always been the lifeblood of better patient care — and accurate documentation is an essential first step to ensuring integrity. Data integrity not only helps improve patient care, it has downstream effects on regulatory compliance, case mix index (CMI), quality reports and your organization’s bottom line, as well. But it won’t stand up today’s pressures and levels of scrutiny unless it all starts with an information governance strategy.
Create a playbook
A lot has been written about health IT and the vast amounts of patient data that is being entered into systems every day. How do we organize it, track it, analyze it, and leverage it to improve patient outcomes? Before we can execute against any of these initiatives, we first have to know that the information is accurate and uniform. Creating a playbook that includes protocols and processes, such as, who is allowed to enter clinical information into a record, what information is included and how it is presented, and a process for amending possible discrepancies is vital. Outlining these procedures and policies will help maintain dataintegrity.
