Healcare IG: Customers Are Taking the Lead by Jeff Forbes

Part VI in the Big Picture Predictions and Perspectives Blog Series

As a leader for the Iron Mountain healthcare industry segment, I am privileged to have the opportunity to meet with providers on a regular basis and hear first-hand some of the challenges they face in this era of health reform. Market forces are radically changing the healthcare landscape, and providers today are faced with a health information explosion driven by initiatives like Meaningful Use and ICD-10 implementation.

Mega Trends

While each health system has its own unique set of challenges, there are some mega-trends that I have seen across the population of providers that impact their ability to effectively manage their health information:

Data Proliferation: Exponential data growth, driven by the electronic health record and new imaging technologies, is driving up storage costs - particularly when retention policies are not enforced.

Silos of Information: The proliferation of clinical and business applications across departments and functions makes it difficult to share information, which can impact the ability to deliver patient care.

Inconsistent Policies and Processes: In an era of limited resources, it is important to obtain efficiencies wherever possible. The distributed nature of health networks have created diverse processes and policies - which can be rationalized where possible to improve outcomes.

Getting to Enterprise-wide IGConsistent across all these trends is the need to better manage this information throughout its lifecycle. Some of the health systems that are proactively addressing these challenges are putting Information Governance initiatives on the front burner - to ultimately help them in their efforts to get control of their information, mitigate risk, reduce cost, and enhance the patient care experience.

While the nirvana of a fully-realized Information Governance strategy is not always immediately achievable, there are some practical steps that leading health systems have taken to accelerate their journey to Health IG. Some of the efforts that our healthcare customers have undertaken include:

Demonstrating the business case for change: Successful organizations have shown how IG supports the organizations' top goals, including cost reduction, risk reduction, and enhanced patient care.

Engaging the chief compliance officer: A sound IG strategy can help drive compliance across the organization, ultimately reducing risk and increasing the ability to respond to audit or discovery requests.

Establishing a cross-functional team of stakeholders: Successful IG projects require broad representation across departments and functions. This team acts as the go-to place for approving and enforcing policies and measuring results.

Shifting resources to higher value work: By eliminating, reducing or outsourcing the storage of physical records and transactional work, organizations can better utilize scarce resources for critical initiatives like ICD-10 or Meaningful Use.

Creating a consistent policy framework: Adhering to policies is critical to successful governance. This framework should reflect the governance decisions, standards and best practices.

Our customers have used these tactics to achieve governance within their organizations, enabling them to successfully reduce cost and risk. As I engage with our healthcare customers across the US, I continue to be excited about the great strides that have been made in the use of healthcare technology and Health IG to facilitate care delivery, and genuinely improve patient and population health.

Join our Twitter Chat: Healthcare IG Predictions & Perspectives

On January 28th at 12:00 pm Eastern, @IronMtnHealth is hosting a Twitter chat using #InfoTalk to further the dialog. If you have been involved in governance-related projects, we'd love to have you join. What IG initiatives have shown success for you? How have you overcome any obstacles? What do you see as the future of IG? Keep the conversation going during our Healthcare IG Predictions & Perspectives #InfoTalk at 12pm Eastern on January 28th.

Hear more voices from the thought leaders of the healthcare industry by reading the rest of the blogs in this series: Big Picture Predictions and Perspectives.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2015/industry/healthcare-information-man...
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