Look Around, Look Around by Sue Trombley

The 2nd blog in the Healthcare Predictions & Perspectives blog series. This blog series is focused on healthcare transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance best practices.

To kick off the New Year, I wrote a blog with the purpose of spurring the records and information management community to embrace innovation and transformation as part of their job function. This was in reaction to recent research that indicates our employers expect us to be more strategic and creative coupled with the privilege of being awed by the inspirational and hyper-innovative musical Hamilton.

As I think about predictions for 2016 and beyond, specific to the healthcare industry, the themes I feature in the blog apply as well. They include:

Data analytics: The Healthcare industry has been on the leading edge of the surge in use of data analytics to benefit patients, as well as to improve operational efficiencies. As there is a push to release virtually all information for analysis, both Health Information Managers and the Health IT function must insert themselves in the process to help identify where information is located, and to ensure that all obligations for protecting private information are met.

Thinking beyond ECMs: Content management systems have value, but they are not designed to manage all the information that is created and received across a health system. A single piece of content has many attributes critical for its safe and compliant management. Examples include retention rules, hold codes, access rights and security classifications, as well as indicators for PII, risk factors and value for analytics. HIM professionals need to explore methods for auto or assisted classification to tag content as close to creation as possible, to alleviate uncertainty later in the lifecycle.

Being strategic: We can all benefit from understanding our organization's business objectives, and aligning our work with them. To remain competitive, healthcare professionals must be strategic about reaching out to the functions for which they can help contribute to success. Partnering with internal audit, compliance, litigation or patient services could lead to more efficient practices in accessing records, defensible disposition, protection of private or sensitive information from breaches, and cost savings.

Health IT and HIM professionals can draw from the central theme of the Broadway musical Hamilton - to look around, look around - and leverage what their peers, as well as other industries, are doing to meet the call to action for innovation and transformation.

And remember, doing things differently for the right reasons can lead to rewards Hamilton just won a Grammy for its music beating out such classics as The King and I and An American In Paris!

Join our Twitter Chat: Healthcare Transformation: Predictions and Perspectives #InfoTalk

On March 17th at 9:00 PT/12:00 pm ET, @IronMtnHealth is hosting a Twitter chat using #InfoTalk to further the dialog on transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance. If you have been involved in Health IT and information governance-related projects, we'd love to have you join.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2016/industry/healthcare-information-man...
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