Guest Speaker Series: Clinical Informatics

On June 22, Jeb Dykema the Director of Clinical Informatics at Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) hosted a virtual presentation for UBC’s Master of Health Leadership and Policy and Master of Engineering Leadership students on the topic of Community Information System Governance.

To begin his presentation, Dykema outlined his team’s vision at VCH: Utilizing data, practice and technology in clinical informatic to ensure clinical workflows and requirements are translated into thoughtful system design and use. His team aims to improve the patient’s experience by building efficiencies for community system users. Ultimately, the Clinical Informatics team “makes the system make sense.”

Making health care systems work to improve patient care, and improve how clinicians interact with patients is a continuous challenge as technology develops rapidly. Thoughtful system design is necessary, and can only be accomplished through governance. Dykema highlighted how governance—a central committee to review new technical additions and requests—keeps workflow efficient and reduces the possibility for errors due to miscommunication.

Without governance, Dykema emphasized that challenges in technical aspects would arise. For instance, technology might be designed to only benefit a few, without considering all users. Further, data quality may deteriorate, leading to weaker patient care.

Dykema explained the three main principles of governance as structure, process, and standards.

According to the above three principles, Dykema and his team funnel requests to designated review teams that have a process by which to review all requests and have the necessary data, experience, and experts to decide on which technical requests get approved.

In Dykema’s opinion, governance in health care is successful when it is clinically focused, when there is appropriate clinical representation, and when the discussion is informed and transparent, and when there is strong communication and coordination.

When governance is successful, then patient care, health care, and clinical care is all improved.

Do you have a goal of working in governance within your industry? Explore of UBC’s professional graduate degrees in Master of Health Leadership and Policy and Master of Engineering Leadership can help accelerate your career.