Master Data Management in Health care
Master Data Management (MDM) is the practice of cleansing, rationalizing and integrating data into an enterprise-wide “system of record” for core business activities (1). It is a discipline used to bring order and control to our data. Master Data is the core business data that is state driven and not event driven. This data is foundation to all business activities. Master Data can be divided into two categories(2):
- Identity Data - such as patient, provider and location identifiers
- Reference Data - which includes common linkable vocabularies such as ICD-9, DRG, SNOMED, LOINC, RXNorm and Ordersets.
Beginning Stages of MDM
Historically, the concept of MDM started with a focus on Master Patient Index (MPI) which preceded technical systems. Duplicate and unclean patient information can impact the quality and safety of patient care being delivered and hence this function of making sure there was one patient record for every patient existed within the Medical Record or Health Information Management (HIM) department of the organization. For example, the same patient may have two medical records if they came in once with their given name and once with their nickname. The department of Medical records is responsible for consolidating these patients manually making sure there was only one paper chart.
References
- MDM in the Context of Data Governance for Healthcare Management http://www.damachicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DAMA-Spring2013-DG-and-MDM.pdf
- Master Data Management in Healthcare: 3 Approaches https://www.healthcatalyst.com/master-data-management-in-healthcare-3-approaches
