IF YOU ARE LIKE most IT organizations, a lot of your time and energy in recent months has been focused on HIPAA compliance. Now it's time to ask, "What's next?"

Chances are that while you were paying attention to meeting government requirements, your critical business issues didn't go away. And, chances are the data that underlies the information your organization relies on is only getting worse.

In the early days of the modern computing era, someone coined the phrase "Garbage in, garbage out" to address the most fundamental issue in computing. It's truer now as we have more data, stored in more places, and used in more places. Today, good data is critical to the success of our businesses.

Typically, tech savvy CIOs and their staffs invest a significant amount of time in designing modern enterprise architectures, refining processes and workflow, and selecting and implementing large-scale applications. But they don't spend much time thinking about the data itself.

That's a problem. It's a problem because, at the end of the day, the quality and timeliness of patient data is critical to your success. It is awfully hard to make good business decisions from bad or out-of-date data, or data you don't even have.

Now that we've protected our data by complying with HIPAA standards, we need to look closely at what we've protected. Is the data about each patient, each plan, and/or each claim, complete, accurate and up-to-date? Is it available to every person and system where they need, when they need it and in the form they need it?

Chances are the answer to one or more of those questions is "no." Chances are there is nothing that offers your organization more leverage in terms of better customer service, efficient operations and improved decision-making than better data integrity at the attribute level, better data integration at the record level and better availability of data at the application level.

The data problem has been around a long time. Almost every organization has a heterogeneous computing environment with data scattered across numerous databases and applications from many vendors. In almost every case, the data about a particular patient is also scattered across those disparate systems. Mergers and acquisitions further complicate the problem by bringing to the table a whole new set of data, databases and applications.

This problem is not new. Despite the sizeable investments that have been made in new technology and integration services, it isn't taken care of either. Traditional approaches to solving data problems have a remarkably poor track record in terms of cost, time and results. Building large data warehouses, adding larger "enterprise applications," creating and managing a system of identifiers, synchronizing database schemas, or using an alphabet soup of technologies—such as ETL, EAI, SOAP, XML and EII—rarely begin to solve the real problem. As a result, despite that effort and expense, there are very few organizations where users are confident that the data in their databases, applications and reports is complete, accurate and up-to-date.

However, in recent years, both the provider and payer communities, from the hospital level to the IDN level to the plan, community and even nationwide levels, have found a new and dramatically more successful way to tame the beast of dirty, siloed data. They've turned to technology proven in the provider community: Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) and known as Customer Data integration (CDI) software in other industries.

Unlike the traditional approaches mentioned above, CDI software is purpose-built specifically for simultaneously improving data integrity and integrating data across disparate systems within an organization. It even works across organizational boundaries at organizations such as RxHub, where physicians all over the country find, in a Web-enabled, HIPAA-compliant split-second, the detailed information they need about one patient amongst records representing hundreds of million people.

HIPAA was a new problem to solve. While you were solving it, the old problems – including the most fundamental computing problem of "Garbage in, garbage out" – didn't go away. Providing your company with complete, accurate, up-to-the moment data offers tremendous leverage for your organization, both across strategic initiatives and for day-to-day operations.

Now, before another HIPAA-like fire gets your attention, and before you launch another large, expensive and risky enterprise project, it's time to put the "I" back in IT by rolling up your sleeves and fixing your data.

Mark Battaglia is senior vice president of marketing at Initiate Systems, Inc. With over 20 years of experience in the software and publishing industries, Battaglia has an extensive background in general management, marketing, strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, operations and finance. Prior to joining Initiate Systems, Mark was executive vice president of SPSS Inc., where he led the worldwide operations of the SPSS Enabling Technologies Division as division president. He received his MBA from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Advisory Board at e-academy.(Ed. note: This article has been slightly revised by the author since its initial publication in the print version of Healthcare IT News.)