The ability to effectively and efficiently manage the vast and disparate array of corporate, patient and other business information that drives today’s largest healthcare services operations is rapidly emerging as a critical objective for the leadership of these organizations—regardless of their respective service delivery and geographic focuses. Information is the DNA that catalyses the actions and reactions of these organizations to the many opportunities and demands that confront healthcare leadership teams on a regular basis—whether driven by patients, customer, regulatory reporting, risk management, shareholder value or other considerations. In short, information can herald the growth of an organization’s brand and performance if properly managed, or choke the life out of the business if its value as a strategic corporate asset is under appreciated or ignored.
If one accepts the premise that the quality of an organization’s information management (IM) infrastructure, supporting systems and practices can materially impact the overall performance of the healthcare organization, then the next logical question is what are the best IM practices that a healthcare providers should adopt and implement to optimize its own performance?
For many if not most healthcare organizations today, the concept of an end-to-end IM program has been an elusive dream. This is especially true with multi-line and multi- national entities where individual business units or lines of business routinely operate in silos with only a thin veneer of shared services and standards in place across the enterprise.
In a few instances, however, some healthcare organizations have already embarked on a path to transform their disparate operations and data plants into an enterprise-level program that elevates information to its deserved status of strategic asset, reshaping the business into a truly information-centric enterprise where both data quality and consumption are aggressively and consistently managed by the leadership team. For those healthcare organizations that have begun or may begin the journey to a more enriched information program, no single resource is more vital to the effort than a leader who is empowered to be the steward and champion of the enterprise’s information. It is this steward who is appointed by executive management to lead the transformation of the enterprise into an information-centric world that is fully connected, operationally efficient and capable of delivering data whose quality is beyond reproach.
So, who within the enterprise is being charged with this most critical responsibility? More and more, major players in the healthcare organization are looking to the Chief Data Officer (CDO)—for many institutions, a new role—as the steward and champion of enterprise information management.