How Data Stewardship Protects Healthcare Organizations

Today’s healthcare industry runs on data—patient and member data, provider data, claims data, population health data, research data, operational data and more. Nearly a third of the world’s existing data is generated by the healthcare industry, while at the same time, industry-wide adoption of digital technologies and tools is accelerating at a rapid pace.

This has all made for smarter and more interconnected systems (and thus better quality of care), but it’s also brought on new IT complexities that organizations must be prepared to handle. Data stewardship in healthcare is critical to this end.

Effective data stewardship in healthcare drives higher data quality, better compliance, more informed decision-making, greater efficiency, enhanced care quality, and an array of other benefits that improve both operational and clinical outcomes.

Most IT leaders know this, but many still struggle to implement comprehensive stewardship strategies that work. The gap primarily exists in their approach—data stewardship can’t happen in siloes, but rather requires a proactive and holistic strategy supported by the right frameworks and technology solutions.

This guide will outline how data stewardship in healthcare—when done right—mitigates organizational risks and drives better performance as well as best-practice steps for achieving it.

Quick Takeaways:

• Data stewardship in healthcare involves strategically managing data assets to ensure accuracy, integrity, security, and usability across systems.
• Effective data stewardship protects healthcare organizations by enabling enhanced compliance, patient safety, data security, cost management, and strategic decision-making.
• It should be implemented using a comprehensive health data management platform that can steward data holistically and at an ecosystem-wide level.
• Adopting this type of solution not only uplevels data management capabilities but helps to foster a culture of collective responsibility for good data stewardship.

Data Stewardship in Healthcare: What It Is and Why It Matters

Data stewardship in healthcare is defined as the strategic management of data assets to ensure their accuracy, integrity, security, and usability across organizations and ecosystems. This involves:

• Maintaining the consistency and reliability of data throughout its lifecycle, including rigorous validation and regular audits
• Ensuring data correctness to support clinical decision-making and patient safety
• Implementing robust encryption, access controls, and compliance measures to protect sensitive patient information from breaches
• Facilitating prompt and efficient access for authorized users, essential for patient care and strategic decision-making
• Standardizing and integrating data to make it actionable for end-users, often leveraging advanced analytics tools

In 2024, the role of data stewardship in healthcare is more critical than ever. The sheer volume of data now generated by EHRs, wearable devices, genomics, and other new and emerging data sources has skyrocketed and presents both opportunities and challenges. In this fast-changing environment, data stewardship protects healthcare organizations in a number of areas that include:

Regulatory Compliance

Regulations and standards like Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), HIPAA, CPRA, the 21st Century Cures Act, and HL7 FHIR impose strict requirements on data protection and interoperability. Effective data stewardship ensures compliance and helps avoid the hefty fines and legal repercussions that come with compliance gaps.

Operational Efficiency

Data stewardship reduces redundancies, streamlines workflows, and enhances the overall operational efficiency of data workflows. It ensures that healthcare providers have accurate and timely data for better real-time clinical decision-making.

Patient Safety and Care Quality

Accurate and reliable data is foundational to patient safety and care quality. Data errors can lead to misdiagnosis, incorrect treatments, and other adverse outcomes. Data stewardship minimizes these risks by ensuring high data quality across systems.

Data Security

The healthcare sector is a prime target for cyberattacks. Robust data stewardship practices, including encryption and access controls, are vital to protecting sensitive patient information from breaches and ensuring data security.

Interoperability

The push for seamless data exchange across different systems and organizations is accelerating. Effective data stewardship supports interoperability and ensures that data is shared securely and efficiently, which is essential for coordinated care and larger-scale population health management.

Cost Management

Poor data management can lead to significant financial losses through inefficiencies, errors, and non-compliance penalties. Data stewardship helps control costs by maintaining high data standards and supporting efficient resource utilization.

Strategic Decision-Making

High-quality data is necessary for strategic planning and policy-making. Data stewardship ensures that healthcare organizations can rely on their data for insights and decisions to drive long-term success.

Claims Adjudication

Data integrity and context is crucial in adjudicating claims accurately and efficiently. Failure to do so has a direct impact on patient / member satisfaction and your organization’s bottom line.

Taking the Right Approach to Data Stewardship

When it comes to effective data stewardship in healthcare, the challenge for many organizations lies in connecting disparate data sources and systems so that stewardship is possible in the first place. Without true interoperability and smooth data exchange, it is impossible to steward healthcare data reliably, at scale, and in an ongoing way.

In other words: Data stewardship must happen, at the very least, at an enterprise-wide level, but ideally should be executed at an ecosystem-wide level. Otherwise, the potential for gaps in data quality remain too prevalent for organizations to rely confidently on their data to make decisions and deliver care.

With this in mind, the best-practice approach to data stewardship in healthcare is adopting a health data management platform (HDMP) that provides comprehensive capabilities for:

• Master Data Management (MDM): Creates a single, reliable source of truth for critical data entities, improving consistency and reducing redundancy
• Real-time Data Integration: Reduces latency and improves the timeliness of decisions
• Advanced Analytics Support: Provides deeper insights and facilitates predictive analytics for better patient outcomes
• Scalability: Accommodates the growing volume and complexity of healthcare data without compromising performance
• Built-in Compliance Features: Ensures organizations stay ahead of regulatory changes
• Culture of Data Stewardship: Fosters cross-departmental collaboration and ensures all staff understand their role in maintaining high data standards
• Collective Responsibility: Promotes a shared commitment to long-term success in data management and leveraging data to its full potential

These capabilities translate to important data applications now required in modern healthcare, such as providing real-time data access for patients, enabling payer and provider collaboration, and sharing data with research and/or government entities to support population-level healthcare initiatives.

Enhancing Data Stewardship with Gaine’s Coperor Platform

Gaine’s CoperorTM Health Data Management Platform (HDMP) is an industry-leading data management solution offering unparalleled features and capabilities to support data stewardship and an array of other complex and mission-critical business use cases across both internal silos and external organizations in your ecosystem:

• Ecosystem MDM: Integrates data from within your organization and across partners to enable confident data exchange
• Much More Than MDM: Includes a profile-based Operational Data Store (ODS) for real-time integration of master data and affiliated data
• Healthcare and Life Sciences Focus: Built specifically for healthcare by healthcare professionals, not adapted from generic solutions
• Unparalleled Data Model: Supports complex, interconnected ecosystems with hundreds of objects and thousands of industry-specific attributes
• Rapid Time-to-Value: Deploys out-of-the-box with customizable rules and policies from a proven healthcare library

Data Stewardship as a Service: Flexible, Expert Support for Your Data Governance Needs

While most data management professionals realize the essential role of data stewardship in any data governance program, many organizations lack the needed resources of expertise. That’s why Gaine complements the HDMP offers optional access to a pool of healthcare- knowledgeable data stewards to accompany our platform. Our team-based approach provides:

• Flexibility: Engage our services on an ad hoc, part-time, or full-time basis
• Expertise: Leverage our healthcare-specific knowledge
• Scalability: Benefit from a shared resource model for cost-effective, long-term support
• Customization: Tailor our involvement to your specific business needs

Coperor HDMP: Empowering Healthcare Data Strategies for Tangible Outcomes

Coperor HDMP was developed and continues to evolve alongside unique needs and challenges in healthcare and life sciences industries. With Coperor, healthcare organizations are able to take charge of their data strategies in ways that directly translate to optimized performance, lower costs, enhanced care quality, and better patient experiences.

Contact us today to fully explore how Gaine can help you implement an effective data governance program.