While organizations maximize data for business success today, they continue to face challenges related to data quality, information silos, privacy, and security concerns, resulting in a compelling need for effective data governance.
Data governance involves defining policies, procedures, and standards for data management. Ensuring that these policies are implemented effectively, and monitoring compliance with these policies. Today, data governance has become the backbone of business decisions because of the result of its importance.
McKinsey states that “data governance is one of the top three differences between firms that capture the value of digitization and firms that don’t.”
Data Governance in Healthcare
It is critical to manage data in any industry, but it also holds particular importance in the healthcare sector and can be summarized as its lifeblood.
Ensuring that available data is authentic, secure, and it also adheres to regulatory requirements is a challenge for healthcare companies. This is because healthcare companies handle an enormous volume of sensitive patient data, and it is essential to have proper governance in place to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance with regulations.
Healthcare companies are exposed to various legal, financial, reputation, and also operational risks without a robust data governance strategy.
Seven Benefits of Data Governance for Healthcare Companies
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Personalized Healthcare Services
It ensures that healthcare companies have access to high-quality data that can be used to make informed decisions about patient care. Companies can identify trends and patterns that may go unnoticed by using standardized data collection, analysis, and reporting. This allows healthcare providers to deliver better patient care by identifying and addressing patient needs and providing more personalized treatment.
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Improved Patient Outcomes at Reduced Costs
One of the core components of data governance in healthcare is data quality to ensure that data is accurate, complete, and consistent. It also involves defining data quality standards, establishing data quality metrics, and monitoring data quality on an ongoing basis. This can lead to better decision-making, improved patient outcomes, and reduced healthcare costs.
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Prevention of Data Breaches
Another critical component of data governance in healthcare is data security. It protects sensitive patient data from unauthorized access, use, and also disclosure. This can be achieved through various measures, such as implementing access controls, encryption, and firewalls. It can help healthcare organizations develop and enforce data security policies. It includes access control, data encryption, and data backup, to mitigate the risk of data breaches.
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Prevention of Legal Issues
Data privacy is closely related to data security and protects patients’ personal information. It adheres to legal and regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, and also CCPA. This can help healthcare organizations avoid hefty fines and legal issues.
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Effective Decision-Making
Data management requires establishing policies and procedures for data collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination. Effective data management is crucial for ensuring that healthcare organizations can use their data effectively.
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Streamlined Operations
Data governance helps healthcare organizations streamline data management processes and avoid duplication of efforts, reducing staff workload. With efficient and standardized data management, healthcare providers can access data faster and make better decisions, ultimately improving productivity.
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Increased ROI
Healthcare companies can better understand and leverage their data assets with proper data governance to create business value. They can also use data to identify opportunities for cost savings, improve patient outcomes, and develop new products and services, leading to increased ROI.
Data Governance in a Healthcare Company – Case Study
A prominent healthcare data marketplace in the U.S. aimed to deliver precise insights to pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations using big data analytics. Their database consisted of over 200 billion lab results, and they needed to accelerate report delivery time.
The objective was to optimize and expand their data analytics and technology operations while achieving significant cost savings. And also the need in complying with healthcare statutes and regulations – in short, implementing a robust data governance system.
Impelsys implemented a one-team approach, utilizing cross-functional teams to develop advanced data analytics processes. The automated cohort analytics engine can process a large volume of data, providing real-time and accurate insights. Additionally, an intelligent dashboard was developed to offer prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive analytics. The integrated teams comprised data scientists, cloud experts, engineers, and clinical experts, ensuring compliance with regulations.
The client benefited from accurate insights extracted from a large volume of data. With a significant reduction in report generation time from days to a matter of seconds, it made things easier. The highly visual and easy-to-comprehend dashboard allowed them to drill down for deeper insights. Their now streamlined operations, compliant with stringent healthcare statutes and regulations, proved cost-efficient on multiple fronts.
In conclusion, data governance is essential to healthcare companies‘ success. It also provides numerous benefits, including improved patient care, increased efficiency, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Healthcare companies can ensure they have access to reliable and accurate data by establishing policies and procedures for data management. This can be used to make informed decisions; effective data governance is a smart investment for any healthcare organization.
Authored by – Venkat Srini and Anuradha Muralidharan
