The impact of the global pandemic on the healthcare system has been a reminder that data governance extends beyond compliance.

As teams of doctors and medical support staff grapple with COVID-19, data becomes particularly important in telling a story, offering insight into critical factors such as hotspots where the coronavirus may be spreading and how patients are responding to treatment.

At facilities such as UNC Health, analytics managers play an important role.

“Due to COVID-19, everything is moving very fast, so it requires us to sit down and capture the information,” said Sonya Jordan (pictured, right), enterprise analytics manager of data governance at UNC Health. “We have data-governance tools in order to capture documentation in a way that it can tell a story about the data. Based on where we were at the first of the year, I can say we have evolved tremendously due to a lot of the pandemic issues that arose.”

Jordan spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of the Informatica CLAIREview Series. She was joined by Rachini Moosavi (pictured, left), executive director of analytical services and data governance at UNC Health, and they discussed how Informatica helps the healthcare group manage its data environment, ways the pandemic has reinforced the role of governance in organizations, and the challenges that remain as hospitals seek to return to a post-COVID level of operation. (* Disclosure below.)

Tools to visualize data

Being able to tell a story with data involves visualizing the information available. This means focusing a data literacy to help users understand what assets are accessible and then providing dashboards to facilitate that process.

“During COVID, it’s been about how we take advantage of the immediate needs that are surfacing,” Moosavi said. “How can we build all of these dashboards in record-breaking time but also make sure that folks understand exactly what’s being represented within those dashboards? Being able to provide that through our Informatica tools and surface it back to our end users in a seamless way, like it’s built into our dashboards, has been a really critical factor for us.”

UNC Health has placed significant emphasis on data governance over the past several years. In 2018, the organization was among only two out of 350 hospitals to achieve top certification for analytics maturity.

The current pandemic has forced UNC Health to draw on its expertise in the data-governance field.

“What COVID has done was enhance the need and understanding of why data governance was important,” Jordan said. “It’s required a great deal of collaboration in making sure you are documenting metrics that are capturing true definition.”

The pandemic journey since March has led UNC Health and other healthcare organizations to move from focusing exclusively on dealing with the virus to reopening services for treatment of other patients. This is a complicated process, one that will depend on accurate data to create the right mix of services for patient support.

“At this very moment we have seven different forecasts that we’re trying to build all at the same time and help us prepare for recovery,” Moosavi explained. “It started out as ‘we’re shutting down so we can flatten the curve,’ but now as we try to reopen at the same time while still meeting the needs of our COVID patients, there’s this balancing act. Analytics is a critical factor in doing that.”

Watch the complete video interview as part of the Informatica CLAIREview Series below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Informatica CLAIREview Series. Neither Informatica, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE