Healthcare organizations collect and store increasingly large amounts of data, which creates incredible opportunities and new challenges for our industry.
It is quickly becoming critical for hospitals to develop information governance strategies.
The following is an interview with Ann Meehan, Director of Information Governance for American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).
What is information governance?
Information governance (IG) ensures that a healthcare organization’s information is trustworthy and reliable for patient care, quality reporting, reimbursement and other critical business initiatives. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) defines information governance as “an organization-wide framework for managing information throughout its lifecycle and for supporting the organization’s strategy, operations, regulatory, legal, risk, and environmental requirements.” In short, a formalized information governance program provides the infrastructure around collaborative decisions about the information lifecycle – creation, capture, use, reporting and disposition – across all business units of an organization.
What are the challenges to trustworthy information?
There are many challenges to the integrity of a healthcare organization’s information. I’ll highlight a couple. First, healthcare organizations moved quickly to implement certified electronic health record (EHR) solutions as part of the HITECH incentives, which were designed to improve the U.S. health system through the adoption of health information technology. In making decisions about the solution, were key stakeholders involved in the process or was the decision made in isolation? Was the focus on the technology itself or the information that would be captured and ultimately used for patient care? Once decisions were made, were data definitions, workflows and processes standardized across all business units or were business units allowed to build these for their specific needs? Were decisions around data definitions, workflows and processes standardized or left to the discretion of the business unit? Without a coordinated effort to implement an EHR solution, such as the collaborative approach that goes into an IG program, variations in data and information are created and the resulting information cannot be trusted.
Next, we are a very mobile society. We all have multiple devices that allow us to capture and share data “on the go.” With this comes an increasing amount of data, much of which is unstructured. We not only need to harness data for patient care, but we need to ensure that the data that we create, capture and use is complete, accurate and useable.
What is AHIMA’s mission in this work?
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) represents more than 103,000 health information professionals in the United States and around the world. AHIMA is committed to promoting and advocating for best practices and effective standards in health information and to actively contributing to the development and advancement of health information professionals worldwide. AHIMA is advancing informatics, data analytics, and information governance to achieve the goal of providing expertise to ensure trusted information for healthcare. Both information governance and information management are necessary to meet the existing and new requirements of an increasingly complex healthcare ecosystem.
How can healthcare organizations show the value of an information governance program?
There are many tangible and intangible values to an IG program. One tangible value is in risk reduction associated with information breaches and cyberattacks that increasingly target healthcare Information governance ensures that policies and procedures are in place to address each of these, the workforce is trained on their job-specific role and that monitoring of compliance occurs.
The three main reasons for a data breach are malicious or criminal attacks; human error; and system glitches. Information governance is comprised of 10 competencies that address functional areas across any healthcare organization. The competencies of enterprise information management; IT governance; privacy and security; and awareness and adherence address all actions needed to eliminate or at least minimize the organization’s susceptibility to a breach or cyberattack, therefore, saving the organization thousands of dollars.
How does a healthcare organization get started with information governance?
AHIMA has a number of free tools and resources that can be used for learning and taking basic steps necessary to implement a program, including the website http://www.igiq.org/. Healthcare professionals should begin to look inwardly at challenges through the lens of integrity of data and information. Inventory these challenges and evaluate where gaps are that create the issues. It’s important to gain an understanding of the maturity of information decisions. That then provides the ability to know what is working and what is not working, allowing the opportunity to then build a road map and prioritize what is most meaningful to your organization.
Ann Meehan, RHIA
Director, Information Governance
AHIMA IGAdvisors®
Twitter: @bellemeehan2
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-meehan-44755817
Ann Meehan has over 30 years experience in healthcare. Ann has an extensive background in leadership and consulting across healthcare organizations including acute care, home health and hospice, and physician practices. She has led business critical initiatives for several large health care organizations, providing oversight and direction to multi-disciplinary teams across operations, revenue cycle, decision support, coding, clinical documentation improvement, decision support, quality, case management, and information governance. She paved the way to shared coding services and a market-driven HIM infrastructure at Ardent Health Services, where she also initiated and served as chair of the enterprise level Information Governance Committee. Currently, she is Director, Information Governance, for AHIMA’s IGAdvisors® specializing in information governance consulting and training solutions. Ann leads Information Governance Boot Camps and one-day IG Forums across the US and has written articles on information governance for many healthcare publications, including Compliance Today, VNAA’s Voice, and Healthcare Business News. She has a passion for ensuring that healthcare organizations’ have trustworthy data and information in support of quality patient care and critical business initiatives. Ann recently spoke at HIMSS17 on “Governing Healthcare Information for Payment Reform” in Orlando and at the Value-Based Care Summit in Chicago.