HIM Professional Establish Data Standards

Hi Prof. Antoisnne,

It is imperative that the HIM professional establish data standards to ensure data quality and consistency. Establishing data standards would help to ensure patient safety, consistent delivery of health care services, plan coordination of care, and standardize healthcare reporting.

Essentially, data standards are needed to assess the quality and consistency of collected data. Organizations need HIM professionals to familiarize themselves with these standards to create an organizational standardized data dictionary, format electronic health records, and standardize the exchange of health information across the continuum for general data management and to ensure the integrity and reliability of gathered data. We need data standards and quality measures to verify the validity, reliability, completeness, and the timeliness of the data that is collected. Additionally, there needs to be standards that address how data is recorded to safeguard the consistency across multiple sources (ex. radiology, laboratory, patient and administration) in an organization. Importantly, data fields and their content need to be standardized, as well.

Therefore, standards development organizations (SDOs) address a variety of aspects for the formulation of health and safety standards that create rules, guidelines, best practices, test methods and specifications for obtaining and measuring data. For example, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and Health Level Seven (HL7) target clinical data