Rapid and Accurate Provision of Critical Data
Organizations define critical elements of their plans, operations, and environment. These elements must be monitored to ensure the plan is working, service and care quality are high, the organization’s fiscal situation is sound, and the environment is behaving as anticipated. Clearly data are required to perform such monitoring.
In addition to their utility in monitoring, data can be used to guide management actions. Internet-based retailers use purchase data to target their advertisements. Providers use data on care costs and quality to devise initiatives to improve outcomes. However, obtaining and reporting critical data is not easy.
Data quality may be limited and incomplete. For example, although physicians are using an EHR, they may not be recording all of a patient’s problems, and many of their entries are unstructured free text. There may be confusion about which patients belong on specific physician panels. There can be significant disagreements about the definition of “a visit.”
Using IT to improve performance through the capture of critical data requires addressing process problems that hinder data capture, developing user incentives to record good data, and engaging in difficult conversations about data meaning.
