A large urban children's hospital in Dallas, Texas, is leading in the delivery of care provided to children from birth through age 18.

Case 6.1

A large urban children’s hospital in Dallas,

Texas, is leading in the delivery of care provided

to children from birth through age 18.

After implementing an electronic health record, the

hospital identified operations in need of improvement.

It found that individual business units

were working in their own silos with little interdepartmental

communication occurring, and the

individual business units had different policies, procedures,

and processes for information governance

and data management. The hospital quickly realized

the need to standardize processes and start

an effective information governance program to help

streamline and manage the vast amount of data being

collected across the organization.

Using tools that are available through AHIMA’s

Information Governance Adoption Model (IGAM),

the hospital evaluated the current state of information

governance at the organization. This was done

through the evaluation and review of informationrelated

policies and procedures throughout the

system. It also created the foundation necessary to

implement a process to review, edit, and update all

those information policies and procedures to create

a consistent and standardized process across all

business units of the organization. Most important,

it showed the need to educate workforce members

on the importance of having a consistent format for

data collection across the entire organization.

The outcome of implementing an information

governance program at the children’s hospital

produced many benefits. The hospital was able

to create a consistent process for training and

educating all workforce members to support

the transparency of data management to use

the information to its competitive advantage. It

created a platform to have open and transparent

conversations throughout the healthcare

organization, supporting the mission of the organization.

By streamlining all the policies and

procedures across the organization, the hospital

was able to break down department silos that

existed within the organization and implement

an organization-wide culture supporting the

information governance program. (Fahy and

Hermann 2017.)

 Questions:

1- As new clinics came onto the health system, they had issues with documentation identification because the same documents were often called different names. What principle of information governance can be applied when documenting the decisions to standardize the naming of documents across the healthcare system? Why?

2-  Why would an interdisciplinary team be selected?

3.  What skills does an eHIM manager need?