Historically, a key driver for the establishment and application of governance has been to address regulatory and compliance concerns. The business intelligence and analytics space has been an early adopter of the practice, and the evolution of governance adoption is starting to expand into the consumer, patient and member engagement and experience domains.
These are no less important today, but clearly demonstrate the “reach” of governance is broadening across a much wider band of the enterprise’s business.
Healthcare, like other industries, is seeing governance move into the operational world, and process owners are adopting the practice more frequently. This is likely due to the ongoing quest for containing cost and optimizing processes where healthcare organizations see governance as being able to deliver on those fronts.
Governance is becoming paramount as the use of information, content, and knowledge continues to expand across a wider variety of business needs including supporting internal processes, developing new services, providing a better patient and member experience, driving towards operational excellence, and adapting new business models.
Implementing a governance program to support these use cases requires a focused involvement from leadership and subject matter experts (SME) in addition to the technical or regulatory staff historically associated with data governance. It will be the business stakeholders and SMEs who will be able to articulate what is needed to support the use cases.
For example, where data gathering and quality errors exist, or where conflicting content and knowledge exists, these individuals can recommend how best to address these errors to ensure the information, content, and knowledge is fit for purpose and drives the desired outcomes.
All of this is indicative of the need for governance to focus upon – and contribute to the success of – business outcomes. For governance to effectively do this it needs to continue on the path of being installed as a holistic enterprise-wide business capability ensuring a business (versus IT-only) perspective.
This blog was co-authored by Mark Steinbacher and Priyal Patel.
To learn more about the rebirth of governance in healthcare, and exploring the trends and impact on patients and organizational operations, you can download the guide below.