Health data stewards are keepers of tribal knowledge, and they’re invaluable when a health system launches or expands a healthcare data analytics initiative. Their intimate and expansive knowledge of how data is collected to represent workflow across different systems can save days’ worth of time (and cost) in the development process while improving the accuracy of the analytics output. But getting anything more than a few spare moments of their time can be difficult because health data stewardship isn’t part of their job description. While it may seem difficult to justify at first, organizations need to formalize the role of the health data steward. The investment will ultimately return many times its value as the organization realizes the advantage of the analytics.

1. Healthcare Data
Stewardship:
The Key to Going from
Information Poor to
Information Rich
— Eric Just

2. “We are data rich and
information poor.”
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Data vs. Information
We hear this often from health
systems with years of data
collection and have terabytes of
stockpiled data.
There are two key components to
turning that data into information.
1. Ready access – Using a solid a
healthcare analytics system to
provide access and accountability
2. Good healthcare data stewardship
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Healthcare Data Stewardship
Data stewardship is the
aspect of healthcare data
governance that focuses on
providing the appropriate
access to users, helping
users to understand the data,
and owns the data quality.
With poor data stewardship
even the best infrastructures
become underutilized and
poorly understood by
knowledge workers who
could be generating value
from the data every day.
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4. Who Should be the Data Steward?
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Because no single person can
know everything about every
system, it’s best to have many
data stewards — at least one
for every major source of data
in the organization.
The best person to perform this
role is the person who knows
the most about how and why
the data is collected in each of
the various source systems.
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Data Steward Tools for Success
Once you’ve identified who
should become data stewards,
there are a few things they will
need to succeed.
First, make sure there’s a good
data warehouse architecture.
This will promote good data
stewardship because it will
eliminate the fragmented data
systems.
A centralized data warehouse
delivers a single reporting
platform and point of entry into
an organized repository of data.
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Data Steward Tools for Success
Provide the data stewards with
a solid set of metadata tools.
These tools will allow stewards
to share their knowledge about
the data mart or marts they are
responsible for.
Metadata tools that allow data
stewards and users to create
and edit descriptions for objects
in the data warehouse provide
this forum and will aid in
creating a self-sufficient data
warehouse user community.
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Creating Long-term Value using
Data Stewardship
Once the data is unlocked in an
EDW, the best way to create
long-term value is to have a
thriving user base.
Data stewards are critical
partners to the data warehouse
team in creating the user base.
They are the data librarians
who advise and guide users,
and help them get the most
value out of the EDW.
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8. Click to view original article for detailed explanation
Healthcare Data Stewardship:
The Key to Going from Information Poor to Information Rich
Data Warehouse Tools: Faster Time-to-Value for Your Healthcare Data Warehouse
Doug Adamson, Vice President and Chief Technical Officer
© 2014 Health Catalyst
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More about this topic
7 Essential Practices for Data Governance in Healthcare
Dale Sanders, Senior Vice President, Strategy
6 Reasons Why Healthcare Data Warehouses Fail
Steve Barlow, Co-Founder and Senior VP of Client Ops
Five Reasons Healthcare Data Is Different
Dan LeSueur, Technical Director
It All Starts with a Data Warehouse: A Detailed Technical Overview
Dale Sanders, Senior Vice President, Strategy
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For more information:
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10. Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
© 2013 Health Catalyst
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Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Eric Just joined the Health Catalyst family in August of 2011 as Vice
President of Technology, bringing over 10 years of biomedical informatics
experience. Prior to Catalyst, he managed the research arm of the
Northwestern Medical Data Warehouse at Northwestern University's Feinberg
School of Medicine. In this role, he led the development of technology, processes,
and teams to leverage the clinical data warehouse.
Previously, as a senior data architect, he helped create the data warehouse
technical foundation and innovated new ways to extract and load medical data. In
addition, he led the development effort for a genome database. Eric holds a Master
of Science in Chemistry from Northwestern University and a Bachelors of Science in
Chemistry from the College of William and Mary.