Every day, humans generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Aside from humans, the internet of things and machines produce additional data that systems must take into consideration. These two sources of data generation make data management a difficult task for any organization that works with data.
What is master data management?
About 90 percent of business data was created in the last three years. Master data is business data shared among multiple systems.
Master data is divided into two types in the healthcare industry.
- Identify data includes patient, provider, and location identifiers
- Reference data includes linkable vocabulary like ICD, SNOMED, LOINC, and order sets.
When looking at the healthcare industry, master data management is linking both types of data across multiple IT systems into a single, consistent point of reference. The single point of reference could be a patient or procedure code.
According to Eliason, Burke, and Hess at the HealthCatalyst “MDM comprises the processes, governance, policies, standards, and tools that consistently define and manage the critical data of an organization to provide a single point of reference.”
Why is master data management important in healthcare?
Modern healthcare organizations like hospitals have poor master data management practices in place which leads to underutilized customer records in different departments. Unsynchronized customer data prevents these hospitals from deriving useful insights that could speed up the patient care process and cross-department data collection.
Master data management is important for accurate health information exchanges (HIEs). The reconciliation of master data is necessary for successful information exchange across locations and organizations. A recent article from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services states that hospital claims under OPPS that do not have an exact match between service location reported on the claim and the practice location listed in PECOS will be denied. This goes to show how important master data management is.
These consequences do not only apply to hospitals but other health organizations as well if proper master data management practices are not in place.
How can Lyniate HealthTerm help your organization take control of your data?
HealthTerm is a terminology solution that addresses all tasks and aspects of healthcare content management e.g. clinical terminologies, interoperability, code systems, and structured clinical content. HealthTerm’s sophisticated software and flexible runtime services (APIs) allow for a customizable platform for the acquisition, maintenance, translation, and distribution of the needed code systems.
As always, Lyniate is looking forward to changing the future of healthcare through interoperability.
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