News Feature | October 13, 2014

Data Governance: A Subject New To Your Healthcare IT Clients

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Using Clinical Data Analytics To Support Your Clients’ Most Important Goals

In a world where healthcare data is increasingly integral to every aspect of the care continuum, your clients will begin to find an overarching approach to data and information to be indispensible.

Enter “information governance” or “data governance.”

What Is Data Governance?
Gartner issued a definition of Data Governance a few years back. That definition, and the resulting holistic approach to information and data, tackles multitudes of your clients’ biggest pain points.

Information governance is the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival, and deletion of information. It includes the processes, roles, standards, and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.

It is derived from our definition of IT governance which may be defined as the processes that ensure effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goal.

AHIMA Taking The Lead
To help solidify an understanding of data governance across the industry, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has recently launched an educational initiative to educate its members. The association has released a 21-page document that includes a set of eight principles that form the foundation of a solid information governance policy.

The Eight Principles
While the eight principles outlined by AHIMA were originally designed for use by organizations in developing effective IT policies and standards, they also provide an opportunity for you as a solutions provider, to not only align your offerings into cohesive packages, but also to market them to clients in ways that are obviously in step with their short and long term organizational goals.

The eight principles are:

  • accountability: oversight and leadership in the organization
  • transparency: documentation that is available, open, and verifiable
  • integrity: a standard of authenticity and reliability of information
  • protection: measures taken to prevent breach, corruption, and loss of information
  • compliance: operating in accordance with laws, regulations, standards, and organizational policies
  • availability: retrievability in timely, accurate, and efficient manners
  • retention: maintenance of information for appropriate legal, regulatory, fiscal, and operational time frames
  • disposition: procedures that provide legal and appropriate disposal options for information that is no longer required.

Going Deeper
A primer on information governance: AHIMA issued this article last year, “IC 101: What Is Information Governance?” as a guide to those new to the concept.