The digital transformation of the healthcare world continues in an unabated fashion. Electronic health records (EHR), while challenging to implement, provide a host of benefits to both care providers and patients.
Electronic pharmacy data is also increasing in importance. Pharmacies obviously need to track the information related to the prescriptions they fill. However, as more pharmacies actually treat patients, differentiating and tracking both types of data becomes critical.
Ensuring pharmacy data stays secure, usable, and accessible requires adopting a disciplined approach known as data governance. This concept is common throughout the technology industry, while becoming increasingly relevant in the medical and pharmacy worlds. Let’s examine the growing adoption of data governance in pharmacy.
An Industry Standard Approach to Pharmacy Data Governance
A professional society focused on healthcare data management facilitates the practice of pharmacy data governance. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) boasts nearly a century of developing industry standards for health records. Their work encompasses everything from large hospital networks to local community pharmacies across the country.
AHIMA’s definition of data governance in general provides a basic understanding of the concept and its subsequent importance:
The overall administration, through clearly defined procedures and plans, that
assures the availability, integrity, security, and usability of the structured and
unstructured data available to an organization.
Applying the goals of availability, integrity, security, and usability to healthcare data illustrates the critical nature of data governance. Once again, with community pharmacies providing direct care services to patients, proper governance of the underlying data becomes vital.
Pharmacy data governance becomes critical considering the amount of data generated by pharmacies.
Ensuring both types of pharmacy data are easily available supports usability while providing value to various medical organizations. At the same time, data security is especially paramount, especially considering the challenges of cybersecurity. A strong pharmacy data governance posture simply makes using and protecting data an easier process.
SPHERE provides an Example of Pharmacy Data Governance
One example of a pharmacy data repository following the principles of data governance is SPHERE. SPHERE stands for System for Pharmacy Health Encounter Reporting and Evaluation. As the name reveals, it focuses on pharmacy encounter data, a relative newcomer when compared with dispensing data.
Seguridad’s engineering team developed SPHERE in tandem with the Missouri Pharmacy Association. Its core functionality illustrates the basic principles of pharmacy data governance in action.
· Availability: SPHERE is a data warehouse constantly available for users.
· Integrity: The stored data is accurate, complete, and consistent.
· Security: SPHERE leverages robust cybersecurity protection, providing secure access.
· Usability: SPHERE is easy to use and understand for system users.
With more community pharmacies providing direct care to patients, tracking the outcomes of these visits becomes essential. A data warehouse following the principles of data governance, like SPHERE, is a key piece in this puzzle.
SPHERE allows the easy sharing of normalized patient encounter data with a variety of stakeholders. These include state governments or any number of qualified health information networks (QHINs). Expect a more efficient healthcare delivery process and better patient care as a result.
Data is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of community pharmacy. A strong data governance footprint combines with secure and accessible data warehousing to drive success while improving patient outcomes.
