From IBM’s Big Data & Analytics Hub:
There is a need for governance in healthcare in the context of the market transformation, and also in relation to cloud, cognitive computing and analytics.
The need for information governance in healthcare has grown dramatically in the past few years because of the proliferation of digital data. Providers now understand that this data is one of the key assets their organizations must manage along with compliance requirements. Clearly the governance list is much longer and I’m just highlighting a few market drivers.
What exactly is data governance?
Data governance are the set of rules and guidelines that users of data agree to follow. It’s the who can see the data, what can they do with it, etc., etc.
Or, as Rob Brull wrote in his post on the Health Care Blog titled, FHIR: Technology and Governance:
“Data governance provides quality control for managing, using, monitoring, maintaining, and protecting PHI. It provides accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models that define what actions can be taken with the data.”
In that excellent article, Rob highlights the need for a single, comprehensive set of governance rules for FHIR, otherwise it will have the same problem that other standards have encountered – too many regulatory bodies getting their hands involved with outrageous fees that price innovators out of the market and discourage providers to use the standards out of security fears or just plain confusion.