A large urban safety net hospital system recently decided that, with continued growth in their physical footprint, there was a need to improve their analytics reporting capabilities, and build a greater data understanding across the organization. They partnered with Prominence to review current operations and develop a plan for a successful data stewardship implementation on an enterprise scale.

Getting from Good to Great

Prominence’s partnership with this health system focused on engaging with key personnel like the Analytics Steering Committee, Data Governance Council, and senior leadership team with the goal of reinventing their current data governance structure and bring transparency to the organization’s data governance system. Goals aimed at making a more collaborative structure and enabling the organization to easily understand where data is and how to most effectively use it.

Prior to their work with Prominence, there was a lack of a cohesive governance structure and resulted in an inability to properly implement functional data governance supported by a productive stewardship community. The partnership with Prominence aided in facilitating and implementing foundational data governance efforts. Once this support structure was created, the institution’s data culture was primed and ready for a data stewardship community to be created.

One common and formidable challenge when establishing data stewardship across any  organization is gathering support from key stakeholders. Stakeholders view stewardship as an extra workload beyond the existing scope of their role. This can often overshadow the benefits of data stewardship. They made expectations and benefits clear to potential stewards. Highlighting that their involvement in this project will serve as an asset to all involved, saving time and effort in the long run as knowledge is more effectively shared throughout the organization.

Establishing Data Stewardship

Data stewardship aligns data experts and allows for greater knowledge sharing across an organization. Advancing strategic goals and supporting process improvements, ultimately facilitating knowledgeable data-driven business decisions. This organization’s goal was to create and publish a list of data and analytics experts across the organization, enabling team members to more easily understand their colleagues’ areas of expertise.

A data stewardship program cannot be stood up overnight. This healthcare group understood that well and worked with Prominence to stage their efforts by first defining domains, establishing an onboarding roadmap and following it to onboard by domain, methodically and strategically building a community of data stewards.

Stewardship expectations were clearly defined and relayed to the new stewards when they were onboarded. All stewardship roles/owners for the domain were called out during the onboarding process including Executive Application Sponsor, Domain Sponsor, Operational Steward, Technical Steward and Project Manager (if applicable).

The leaders of this project aimed to leverage use cases that communicated the value in these stewardship efforts and encouraged buy-in from subject matter experts across the organization. This data stewardship project created an organizational community that facilitates data conversations between domain experts. With an end goal of clearly identifying data and analytics experts by domain, this creates a community ready to tackle process improvement and an increase data integrity and reliability at an enterprise scale. Improved communication between departments and data stewards enables team members to more accurately use data-driven reporting and analytics with improved data literacy. This network of stewards will continue to grow as more domains are continually onboarded. Helping facilitate conversations and enhancing resource use by including the most appropriate resources in every data and analytics conversation.

Would your organization benefit from an improved data governance structure? Contact our team today to learn more about how Prominence can make healthcare smarter.