Data governance workshop focuses on action

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A two-day data governance summit will be held in 2019 following an enthusiastic response to the idea at the data governance workshop held on the final day of the HiNZ Conference 2018 in Wellington today.

Auckland District Health Board chief digital officer Shayne Tong and Allied Health informatics clinical lead at Canterbury District Health Board Rebecca George presented the idea of a summit, saying there needs to be better collaboration in this area and a focus on action.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to leverage what we have currently got; we just need some more leadership and collaboration to bring it all together so we think about how to move forward from a data and interoperability perspective,” Tong told attendees.

Tong also outlined his new team at ADHB and his focus on data and digital.

“We are driving towards a data-driven digital healthcare system,” he said. This includes new roles: head of data, head of advanced analytics and head of digital enablement.

He said a key focus is on leveraging the AWS Azure platform for mobility and automation.

As well as focusing on the need for collaboration, a number of presenters discussed the important role of data governance.

Information management consultant Karolyn Kerr said, “If done properly, data governance is a huge cultural change for an organisation.

“However, just having a data governance group is not enough, you need a mechanism so they can see what policies can enacted on the ground.”

She said the group needs to be at executive level so they can make changes across the entire organisation. Data stewards, subject matter experts who understand the context of the information, are also key and can sit on the data governance group.

“I often see data governance programmes in place without stewardship, and it doesn’t work,” she said.

Kerr said data that has been collected for one reason is now often being used in other contexts and it is important to ensure the quality is good enough for those different uses.

“Central agencies are a long way from where the data was collected. It’s a distributed environment so we need stewardship people at the coalface where they’re collecting information, to make sure it’s of sufficient quality and it reflects reality,” she said.

George and Waitemata District Health Board executive director allied health, scientific and technical professions Tamzin Brott presented on the clinical need for data governance.

“We have a vast amount of workforce knowledge that we are not capturing out there … frameworks are required to collect and interpret that knowledge to give meaningful outcomes,” said Brott.

“We need knowledge, but in order to obtain knowledge we need to be underpinned by information and data.”

George said leaders in the field need to help healthcare staff make a fundamental shift to engage with data governance and understanding, as these issues can overwhelm clinicians, but data is key to helping them understand how to improve care.

“If there’s no data, there’s no information, no analysis, no knowledge and no improvement,” she told the audience.

She said clinicians are keen to engage and are tired of implementing changes in their care and not seeing an improvement in outcomes.

Zeeman van der Merwe from ACC spoke about the implementation of ICNet tool to help manage patients and the risk of infections at health providers. He said infections are the most frequent claim for treatment injury at ACC and the number is growing exponentially.

“If we collect good information and understand it and present it back to clinicians we can standardise clinical practice and prevent infection events,” he said.

Five DHBs are using the data tool, which van der Merwe said has huge potential benefits to the sector in terms of saving local resources and giving a national perspective of how infections are travelling across the country.

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