The need for data governance services is slowly but aggressively penetrating the healthcare sector. Adequate data management offers several benefits centred around how hospitals can maintain a value-based model around their supply chain. Hospitals can accurately put together the total costing of healthcare provision to patients while offering the ability to reduce or save investments without compromising on their service provision.
With the sheer volume of data circulated within healthcare provision, ensuring the data is handled with both accuracy and integrity is critical. The healthcare sector is a sensitive industry with information at large points being the difference between life and death situations. When providers can implement strong data management and governance skills, the decision-making process is built with clarity and precision. If data management is aptly performed during core management practices, this effect is carried downwards for all-round better decision making. The end goal is to ensure the health sector ecosystem benefits all patients procuring services and keeps hospitals and clinics functioning as successful businesses.
What is Healthcare Data Governance?
Incorporating strong security measures to protect sensitive data accumulated in the healthcare industry has been a long-standing practice. However, data governance within the industry could use maturing mechanisms to evolve into the measures needed. As a result of the lack of governance maturity, the spectrum data governance falls on sits at extremities. With more sustainable implementation, the healthcare industry is bound to find a happy medium between data analytics and adequate service provision.
The core components of data governance entail:
- Ensuring firm policies and security measures are used to moderate data movement within an organisation.
- Providing a finite set of access rights to individuals within the data management process and ensuring information is only accessible to professionals who can utilise the data for better decision making.
- Allowing past data records to reach administrators who frequently must check back at previous data. Additionally, mapping modifications to data records must be a non-negotiable part of the framework.
- Strong roadmaps to ensure the data movements can be tracked and where data sits within the larger framework.
By implementing stronger data governance frameworks, healthcare providers are able to generate better quality outcomes in shorter periods of time. The volume of information exchanged within these environments requires strong categorisation and organisation skills to maintain transparency. If this information needs to be shifted to a third-party organisation such as a pharmacy or health insurance company, the data sets need to be well protected and accurate. Within the healthcare sector, data governance outlines strong data management methods and ensuring that information stays only within the rotation of verified individuals and professionals.
Core Management Principles of Healthcare Data Management
Introducing Balanced and Lean Data Governance
As data governance is either too aggressive or too lax within the healthcare industry, more organisations need to migrate to balanced practices. The data governance committee within hospitals and clinics is heavily required to ensure the investments made are beneficial to the organisation and to patients. Starting off slow with data governance, in terms of investing where needed and building as the data management needs to be scaled upwards is highly recommended and more likely to see success.
Maintaining Data Quality
Inadequate data capturing leads to poor data quality and even worse decision-making skills. When any healthcare provider is looking at data management protocols, it is heavily recommended to the institute to look at data capturing by validating the data is entered in completion, the data entered is valid, and the timelessness of the data entered. Introducing a data governance committee helps keep information entries pertinent and useful.
Optimizing Access
With the sensitive nature of the data provided in healthcare environments, providers must be cautious with access permissions. Data governance is critical to ensuring sensitive data stays protected and is only accessible to authorised individuals able to maximise the data viewed.
Training to Ensure Literacy
Mismanaged data governance is a core component contributing to management sitting at extremes. Practices are either too stark or too lax. Introducing firm training measures to ensure data is inputted correctly and managed appropriately is key to successful data governance. Additionally, implementing the right complementary tools, software, and mechanisms is the simplest way to ensure all data acquired is meaningful and resources dedicated to procuring the same do not go to waste.
Prioritising Analytics
Adequate data governance allows healthcare providers understand whether corporate goals and objectives are met. With valid information provided and managed, hospitals and clinics can understand where further care must be dedicated and where failures in service provision crop up. From a business perspective understanding, this information helps reallocate resources and investments into areas where service can be improved. This could include procuring better quality equipment or enhanced customer service.
Benefits of Strong Data Governance in Healthcare
Through leveraging big data management practices, quality data governance activities can reap strong benefits to the organisation. These benefits include:
- Significantly improved data quality and visibility
- Lowering costs through data management concentration
- Quicker access to data lakes to perform more complex analytic operations, including predictive analytics and data visualisation.
- Firmer data security
Much like any business, implementing efficient data management practices allows businesses to pinpoint industry trends and understand the process effectiveness from when a patient enters the hospital/clinic environment to the time they are discharged. Effective healthcare data governance can also reduce long-term medical costs that stem from poor inventory management and staffing concerns. The global data governance market is expected to reach $2 billion by 2022, increasing from $800 billion in 2016. (MRFR)
Conclusion
Data governance and management within the healthcare industry has the potential to change the optimisation of service provision. For healthcare providers looking to improve all aspects of their practices and processes, employing strong governance and management measures with the flexibility to scale operations up or down as needed can be exceedingly helpful. For realistic and practical decision making, utilising a comprehensive data governance strategy is well recommended.
