How Strong Health Data Governance Ensures EHR Data Integrity
Health data governance best practices are necessary for ensuring providers are getting the most out of their EHR systems. Maintaining the principles of data governance and implementing strategies to improve EHR data quality, use, and exchange can lead to better patient safety, health IT interoperability, and clinical efficiency.
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) continues to stress the importance of effective EHR data management and appropriate changes to clinical processes and workflows in the wake of rapid rates of EHR adoption and the growing need for accurate, timely information for high-quality patient care.
“The complexity of technology and the associated process and workflow changes associated with it can result in unintended consequences,” it stated the association. “While IG recognizes the importance of technology, it realigns the focus from being solely on technology to the people and policies generate and manage data and information for safe, high quality care.”
Health data governance is also useful for supporting patient engagement strategies for healthcare organizations interested in allowing patients greater access to their own electronic health information.
“IG addresses the need for transparency, accuracy, and integrity of information shared with patients,” stated AHIMA. “This is absolutely essential for patients to have confidence in their providers and fully participate as members of their healthcare team.”
Well-established data governance best practices as well as new developments in data provenance and EHR use guidelines can assist providers in optimizing health IT for improved patient health outcomes.
To assist healthcare organizations in reaping the benefits of data governance, AHIMA developed the Information Governance Principles for Healthcare (IGPHC) framework.
The framework sets forth a foundation of best practices for healthcare IG programs guided by the following eight principles:
Accountability-Healthcare organizations should require a member of hospital leadership to oversee a health data governance and management program. Healthcare organizations should also adopt a set of policies and procedures so the program can be audited.
Transparency-Healthcare organizations should document all health data governance processes and activities in a way that is both open and verifiable.
Integrity-Health data governance programs should be designed to ensure all health data in an organization’s EHR system come from a reliable source.
Protection-Precautions should be in place to protect health data from potential breaches and corruption.
Compliance-Health data should comply with existing regulations, standards, and organizational policies.
Availability-healthcare organizations must ensure health data is accessible in a timely and accurate manner.
Retention-Healthcare organizations must store data for an appropriate length of time in accordance with legal, regulatory, fiscal, operational, and historical requirements.
Disposition-Healthcare organizations must dispose of health data in a secure and appropriate manner.
These overarching guidelines for data governance best practices are necessary for providers interested in optimizing the benefits of EHR use and maintaining patient safety and health data security in a digitally-driven healthcare industry.
While the standards established by AHIMA may be useful for establishing data governance strategies, improvements to health data integrity are still being developed in 2017.
Another way healthcare organizations can ensure a high level of health data integrity is through utilizing solutions to determine data provenance.
Despite progress in cementing a set of data governance best practices, federal organizations are still working to develop these solutions.
