As healthcare organizations start shifting their energies from the EMR implementations, managing the vast amount of data will ramp up. This will mean that the traditional roles within organizations will change. New technology is replacing old ways of working, and it requires healthcare organizations to be agile in developing or hiring in the right skills.

Healthcare delivery systems are really focused on lowering its operating and acquisition costs, this will come through the study of data and standardization of processes. At the recent HFMA conference in Las Vegas Cedars-Sinai Medical Center stated that “the task of studying decisions that doctors make” will help reduce healthcare costs, not only the continuation of reforming operations.

HFMA conference: changing physician choices to lower costs

The one question I’ve heard from several senior executives is “can we trust the data”. Many organizations continue the path of acquisitions of practices, hospitals and health systems. In addition, investing into a single patient record EMR is starting to ramp down. The biggest problem facing these health systems is all the disparate or legacy systems that are no longer being used. The large amounts of data within these legacy systems are critical to not only medical records retention and release of information, but the analytics, trending and predictive efforts to improve patient care are vastly missing and very complex to aggregate and bring into a single patient record.

Responsibilities of managing data are in desperate need of being defined in organizations. There are massive amounts of it, with a lack of common definitions across systems and quality checks for accuracy. Below is a high-level framework for data governance to help illustrate the complexity to get to high levels of confidence in the data. This is a patient expectations of their healthcare providers that they have all the information to help care for them, prevent health issues, and provide the best outcomes possible for their dollar.