With Big Data Comes Big-Time Data Governance: UPMC’s Forward Push

And, third, 18 months into our program, we have over 200 people with named responsibilities and decision rights throughout UPMC. These are new roles, and they are all part-time. We have backed them with a policy. And we’ve enhanced job performance criteria, for all these individuals, so they have formal descriptions that indicate that. I’ll start with the 26-member Data Governance Council. There are lots of clinicians on the council; most have some role involving working with IT; we also have representation from strategic planning, finance, and HR, and a few IT folks as well. And the Council is the ultimate decision-maker; they approve all of our roles and policies. And their biggest role is to be data evangelists, to educate people on data governance. And people still struggle with terms like metadata and master data; it’s a long process to get people comfortable. So we’re trying to use very tangible concepts when we talk to people. And that takes time.

The next role is information owners. None reside in IT. An information owner—we have an information owner of lab data and an information leader for pharmacy, and one over registration data, which is really big. So these people sign off on all the data definitions, on how we’re going to use the data, and their role will continue to increase, as we give them more information about where their data resides, and what we’re doing with it. And some of these individuals are thrilled, because they finally have decision-making capabilities, but most are uncomfortable, because we’re still working on metadata. And below information owners are data stewards. So for example, the information owner over registration data, will name data stewards over inpatient registration, over outpatient registration, over ED registration, over home healthcare, for example.

We don’t expect the information owners to have expertise in all those areas, but we want to grow their knowledge. This will be a huge time-saver in virtually every area, because we will be able to go to one person and engage. Right now, we have to go to 20 people, and no one person has decision rights. So the data stewards, their primary role are to write data definitions; and they’re also the primary resource on data integrity issues, and they’ll do research to help us determine whether we need system or process changes to fix problems.

And we have two other types of stewards unique to UPMC; and this may be one of the reasons other data governance programs falter. So, we have application stewards, and they live in IT and represent one of the 1,200 applications. And their primary role is to explain what their application does, how it collects and uses data; and they’re also responsible for the quality of the data outbounds, so the quality is better than it is today. So it’s a very IT-focused role. And the final role is the analytics steward; and these individuals represent a team of individuals that creates reports to share with the organization. And for the first time, we’ve pulled the top 40 teams, and they met together and came up with their own agenda for year one.

And they’ve decided to create an inventory of core reports, and standardization of headers and footers, and use of standardized definitions. And what’s interesting is that they’re working together across the organization for the first time. And they’re finding redundancy, where multiple teams are sharing multiple reports that overlap. And we’re striving towards self-service, and these analytics stewards are going to drive that process, so that self-service can be valuable and not harmful. Isn’t that exciting? I don’t think you’ll find that to be unique here.

It seems also that your data governance initiative fits into broader trends in healthcare. Right now, processes and policies are being made more conscious now in healthcare, right?

Well, what I’ll say is this: we want to have a great experience for the patient, and we don’t want to waste money. And some of the most creative people will find ways to get the job done. So you’ll see an amazing amount of creativity in healthcare to get things done, because there’s never been an enterprise-wide approach in organizations. And, for example, we get data requests all the time in the organization; and everybody has their own myths about, how, certain types of data are sensitive, we shouldn’t do a certain thing. But in a lot of cases, people were going to different people and getting different answers. So we’re naming what is sensitive or not, and whom you go to for approval, such as around referral data. So it isn’t so much that things were done the way they always were, but it was the best we could do.

So until you create a system of processes, you can’t improve things, right?

Yes.

What is the hardest thing about doing all of this?

That people become very attached to processes. Specifically in IT, we have people who have built their careers simply based on knowing processes, since everybody has to go to them for answers. So we’re putting all this knowledge in tools, so data can be readily available. And we don’t want the risk of people leaving the organization, and data knowledge going with them. So to be optimal, we have to get all of our data knowledge and processes into tools, so everyone can use them. And the other big challenge is time.

How important is it for a healthcare organization to define those roles and responsibilities? Is that an essential component of data governance strategy?