Atlas Data Governance

Atlas Data Governance is a web-based index of metadata stored in DOS. Data governance is about securing and controlling data, but it is also about deriving value from data. Most data governance software vendors provide tools for one or the other. Health Catalyst provides both as an integrated system. Atlas ensures healthcare leaders and clinicians have access to consistent, quality data to help them make better decisions. Together they use the tool to collaborate and create common definitions.

Atlas allows you to discover analytics and the building blocks to help you create your own.

The problem

Many organizations put together a data governance structure but don’t have an integrated technology solution to implement effective data governance, which requires both consulting services and tools, not just one or the other. ​ Health Catalyst helps validate and establish governance processes and provides tools to facilitate those processes.

Our approach

Healthcare data is complex. Effective data-governance solutions approach this complexity in pragmatic ways.​ Others go to extremes. They require too much overhead or focus only on part of governance.​ Health Catalyst helps organizations manage all areas of governance and all data domains by focusing on essential processes and on essential data.  Atlas provides a web-based index of metadata, enabling data owners and stakeholders the ability to securely access data and collaboratively standardize common definitions.

Benefits and features

• Promote consistent, quality data and reporting across the organization, including regulatory and quality reporting, enabled through stored, standardized definitions (e.g., LOS and readmissions).
• Use an integrated search to quickly navigate to data in collected in the metadata repository.
• Track data lineage to identify on what data measures depend.
• Analyze the impact of data changes.
• Create and reference standard value sets for the organization.
• Manage updates to metadata, such as names and descriptions of fields, entities, measures, etc.

Use cases

• A Data Steward assigned to her organization’s surgery domain needs to understand all the data for which she is responsible and to ensure that each element is defined accurately and is available to everyone in her organization. She searches Atlas’s Data Catalog for the EMR's surgery-module data. She asks to be assigned in Atlas as the “data steward” for these elements and reviews and updates their existing metadata. In the Atlas Comments section for each element, she responds to questions and clarifies the best use of each in creating measures for analytics.
• A Clinical Data Analyst wants to understand what analytics (e.g., reports, etc.) exist for sepsis. He searches in Atlas and finds a Sepsis Prevention web-based QlikView tool. He clicks on its “Owner” email link in Atlas, finds that it has the information he wants, and clicks on the link in Atlas to “Request Access.”
• A BI Developer is asked to create a readmissions dashboard for one of the directors in her hospital. She searches in Atlas’s Analytics Catalog and finds a Tableau dashboard that includes 30-day readmissions as one of its metrics. She contacts this dashboard’s owner to see if she can get a copy of the original Tableau file and the subject-area data mart (SAM) that feeds it so that she can understand how it was created and reuse as much of it as possible for the dashboard she is creating.