Information governance is what hospitals, and in fact all organizations, need to not only tie together data from diverse departments but to trust that the information is clean, up-to-date, and privacy protected.
“It really is a concept that applies to any industry, a concept of an overarching program in a collaborative way that provides management across all information,” said Ann Meehan, director of Information Governance for the American Health Information Management Association. “More and more hospitals are adopting this model.”
Meehan and AHIMA work with hospitals to implement governance strategies. IG can be viewed as the technology guru, cutting across information in various departments, from patient care to financial to human resources and even contracts.
“People are doing things here and there, not necessarily across the organization,” Meehan said. “There can be two different reports from two different departments, on the same thing. Collaboration gets tripped up. Some people think it’s another level of bureaucracy. My point is: how many times do we have to pull a team together to fix something retrospectively?”
Perhaps its biggest selling point is that information governance saves money.
“If we’re wasting time on the back end trying to figure out what went wrong with the front end, we will ultimately reduce costs because of (IG),” she said.
Standardized data helps with payment reform, bringing together the different alphabet soup of terms.
Three areas payment reform should address are improving the patient experience, population health and cost, Meehan said.
A new administration doesn’t change that.
“No matter what President Trump does, it’s going to address those three things,” she said. “At the end of the day, we need trustworthy information. MIPS, APMs, no matter what payment model is imposed upon us.”
Meehan will address “Governing Healthcare Information for Payment Reform” Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Room W307A.
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.