AHIMA: information governance key to managing data
As health IT systems continue to transform, providers should manage data like an asset through a framework of information governance, Lydia Washington, MS, American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) senior director of HIM Practice Excellence, and AHIMA member Sandra Nunn, MA, RHIA, CHIP, announced during a March 6 session at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in New Orleans.
The speakers described information governance as an accountability framework that allows efficient and effective information use across an organization to achieve its goals. To get there, providers must transition from managing data in silos to engaging in a more integrated, collaborative approach with enterprise information management (EIM) based on an information governance framework, they said.
The EIM would incorporate different types of information, the speakers said, including:
- Organizational memory and records for patient care and for compliance, business and legal needs; and
- Operational efficiency for patient quality and safety, productivity and competitive advantage.
The speakers see EIM as an important component to drive health IT reform, but reported that 85 percent of providers have little or no EIM efforts in place. They expect this to change within the next two to three years.
“EIM is an opportunity for departments to work together to establish common definitions that eventually lead to data that can be acted upon,” said Nunn. “With this information, organizations can develop models to predict staffing and resource costs, for example. Information governance will create the necessary policies and processes to ensure the best data is extracted and maintained for organizations."
“It’s important to recognize that information can be expensive to store and maintain, and not all of it has the same value – some is redundant, outdated or trivial,” said Washington. “Making the decisions on the value of information is a big part of information governance.”