Health Data Governance and Healthcare Litigation

Now that EHRs have been widely implemented, data integrity efforts are being deployed to improve EHR quality. To aid in this effort, organizations must create and enforce health data governance policies, which should address data security, integrity, and access while identifying the organization's data governance mission, strategy, key players, tools and resources. These policies should also address integration and data sharing. Although as many as two thirds of initial data governance attempts fail, covered entities must have data policies in place under the HIPAA Security Rule. When the OCR conducts HIPAA Privacy, Security and Breach Audits, they request these policies and check whether they have been adhered to. In healthcare litigation, it would be wise to request and review data governance policies, as they might provide information on ancillary systems, data flows and work processes that lead to additional discovery. Are you asking for data governance policies in healthcare litigation?