Data Warehouses: Overcoming Governance, Integration Issues

To bypass some governance issues, Bobbie Byrne, M.D., vice president of IT at Edward Hospital, took what she called a “stealth” approach to creating a data warehouse for her 350-bed hospital in the Chicago suburbs. “I’d seen a whole lot of data warehouses that were 10 years in the making before you ever got anything useful out of it,” said Byrne. “I was certain that we would under-promise and over-deliver.”

Byrne said she wanted to show her executive team what her department had done, instead of what could be done, so she made incremental investments and took what she called an “analyst to analyst” approach, having one of her team members reach out to an analyst in each department to pull its data into the data warehouse. Over the past two and a half years, she and her team have been knitting together the more than 300 software products, 10 of which are core to patient care, to create its data warehouse.

Byrne said the issue at her organization is not who puts data into the warehouse, but who takes it out. “We all talk about getting the data into the hands of users, but we felt like in order to do that in the future, we had to pull it back in tighter so we could have a little more process and a little bit more governance around the use of the data before we could start pushing it back,” said Byrne. Her team used a tech-heavy approach to get control by only turning on certain Microsoft Reporting Services access to those who had received training and were a part of the data integrity team.

Point of Care Usage
Another challenge that was aired during the panel discussion was how to use data from warehouses at the point of care.

“Now we’ve decided that [our data warehouse] has been pretty successful on the back end, but it’s not successful on front end,” said Reynolds. “It’s not successful at the point of care.” Children’s first step in this journey will be to align with its ambulatory facilities with the eventual goal to share data in a meaningful way without employing an “army of people” to do it, he said.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s data warehouse is updated every night at midnight. Even though its data warehouse can be currently used to track infectious disease spread within the cancer center (detailed patient information like what rooms patients visit and who the patient interacts can be accessed in minutes), Skarulis says her organization has been discussing moving to real-time updates to fuel alerts and further analysis.