In this day and age, you have more information about your patients than ever before. The difficulty for doctors lies not in gathering information, but in sorting the information to make the right decision.
If your care team is struggling to make sense of data, a data governance strategy can make all the difference between a bogged down workflow and a stellar patient experience.
Not convinced? Here are three important reasons why you need a data governance strategy.
Turning Data into Information
The single biggest reason that you need a data governance strategy?
It’s simple: you need to turn data into information.
There are heaps of patient data out there, between basic health information uploaded to the Cloud from wearables and data collected during regular checkups and appointments. Unless you can extract meaning from all of that data, it’s never going to be anything more than a list of numbers.
A solid data governance strategy is an essential component of this process. It allows you to build a complete medical history of a patient from their earliest appointment to the current moment while ensuring that data is complete and meaningful to allow for collaborative care decisions.
Ensure Availability
Of course, even the smartest healthcare data management solutions won’t look all that clever if a team can’t find the data they need to make decisions.
Here, again, a data governance strategy can save the day.
When uniformly employed across a whole organization, the right data governance strategy can make it easy for any user to find exactly the information they need, whenever they need it. Of course, certain departments will still “own” certain datasets and may have layers of access, but gaining access to the data you need is much easier when you already know what you’re looking for and where to find it.
This can also help you avoid security breaches, as it’s much easier to track information access across the whole organization if your governance system is uniform.
Using Meaningful Analytics to Bolster Your Workflows
Healthcare providers know that the explosion of data is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, clinicians have a greater capacity to make informed decisions thanks to a complete picture of the patient’s health. On the other hand, the sheer volume of information makes it incredibly difficult to create a streamlined workflow and find only the information that’s most relevant when making a care decision.
Data governance is a critical piece of the puzzle, as it allows organizations and systems to deliver crucial data and data-driven results without overwhelming clinicians. It lets you deliver the right information at the right moment and cut out all the extra noise.
This, in turn, makes your point-of-care workflows more efficient, improves your staff’s ability to deliver quality care, and boosts your patients’ trust in your capacity as a care provider.
Do You Need to Build a Data Governance Strategy?
If your organization needs help in building a data governance strategy, our team is here to help.
At Lifepoint Informatics, we take pride in offering the clinical data integration solutions you need to make your team stronger. Want to find out how we can help? Use our contact page to request more information or request a demo.