The number of mergers, acquisitions, and collaborative partnerships in healthcare continues to skyrocket. That’s not going to change for the next few years unless the FTC decides to be more restrictive. In all of these activities, older generation executives (I can say that because I’m older) have underestimated the importance and difficulties—technically and culturally—of integrating data and data governance in these new organizations, and the difficulties are exponentially more complicated in partnerships and collaboratives that have no formal overarching governance body. In 2014, 100 percent of Pioneer ACOs reported that they had underestimated the challenges of data integration and how the lack of data integration has had a major and negative impact on the performance of the ACOs.
Seamless Data Governance
After 33 years of professional observations and being buried up to my neck in this topic, especially the last two years as the topic finally matures in healthcare, I’m convinced that the role model organizations in data governance practice it seamlessly. That is, it’s difficult to point a finger directly at a thing called “Data Governance” in these organizations, because it’s completely engrained, everywhere. As I’ll state below, it reminds me of the U.S. transition in the early 1980s when organizations finally realized that product quality was not something that you could put in an oversight-driven Quality Department, operating as a separate function. Quality must be culturally embedded in every teammates’ DNA. Data governance is the same, especially data quality.Continue reading…
