AHIMA's IG pilot participants offer lessons learned

The healthcare organizations that began taking part in AHIMA’s information governance (IG) pilot program are ready to offer several best practices and critical success factors.

In a blog post, Lydia Washington, MS, RHIA, CPHIMS, said 11 healthcare systems representing more than 50 hospitals and 400 affiliated physician practices, shared their experiences applying principles, the Information Governance Adoption Model (IGAM), and other tools developed by AHIMA.

The following is some of the early learning garnered from those organizations’ IG experiences:

• Educate senior leaders about IG and identify one or more champions at the executive level, wrote Washington. "The most successful sites invested time not only in educating senior executive leaders about IG, but also communicated clearly about how it would enable the executives or the organization to address business goals such as growth, cost reduction or identifying the source of truth so that decision-making could truly be data-driven (the latter being a major challenge in many organizations, today)."
• IG leaders must engage early and often with a broad array of stakeholders. "Silos must be addressed early on. IG cannot occur in a vacuum." 
• Data governance (DG) provides a strategic stepping stone to enterprise IG, wrote Washington. While DG is crucial for healthcare transformation goals related to analytics, population health management, and care coordination, it is just a starting point that facilitates IG.
• Use an IG assessment tool for getting started. AHIMA’s IGHealthRate, she wrote, provides a framework and context for determining the organization’s IG posture and providing a path for goals. "Critical organizational competencies and success factors are identified that can predict readiness, spot strengths and weaknesses, and suggest next steps. As the AHIMA pilots have discovered, such a tool can go a long way toward getting around the initial barrier of just knowing where to start."