In addition to the services provided to Children's Hospital researchers, the Clinical Reporting Unit (CRU) participates in multiple initiatives dealing with the treatment of our data resources.

Our role in these initiatives results in data stewardship intended to ensure that researchers' primary data concerns are voiced in data-relevant Hospital endeavors.

Support of Children's Hospital Data Initiatives:

• Data integration
• Data governance
• Data quality
• Data modeling
• Technology assessment

Data Integration: The CRU is heavily involved in Children's Hospital initiatives to integrate data from multiple systems and across technology centers. Our diverse experience in the following areas offers a global view of the data that can guide key decision points on how data is integrated. For example, our expertise can be used to identify:

• Hospital practice and how it influences data capture methods in:
• Inpatient visits
• Outpatient and "well" visits
• Specialty care
• Billing practices
• Pharmacy services
• The exact schemas and modeling required to capture specific attributes
• Areas of redundancy across systems
• Modeling methods used by various hospital units
• Data application by Hospital researchers

Data Governance: The CRU's unique knowledgebase positively influences policies derived from general data governance issues. Our interactions on data governance have included the following:

• Hospital-wide data attribute definitions and the ongoing development of a "data dictionary" concept
• Data access policies and procedures
• Data control points (i.e., Who governs what?)
• Data standard models
• Data compliance issues with various regulatory bodies

Data Quality: Our customer base, Children's Hospital researchers, relies on the delivery of data that is of the highest possible integrity. We have taken direct actions to ensure that our data extraction procedures are robust.

In addition, we influence the underlying quality of the data itself by participating in, and sometimes leading, the following types of initiatives:

• Ongoing assessments of how data is captured during clinical practice
• Frequent assessments of data capture interfaces in various clinical settings
• Resolution of data quality issues that are discovered through our daily service offerings

One of the most gratifying rewards of our unique position within the organization is our ability to find issues with the data that are unintentionally derived from the way physicians interact with electronic health systems and decision support.

Data Modeling: The CRU offers suggestions to the primary database management groups within Children's Hospital in order to model specific attributes in a manner that allows for easy access, better integration potential, and more sensible interpretation. The CRU has previously interacted with these groups on items such as:

• Modeling specific attributes
• Ensuring schema consistency for updated versions of databases
• Performing data migration from one database to another

Technology Assessment: Emerging technologies offer increasingly robust solutions for large enterprise data systems such as Children's Hospital's data systems. As these technologies are assessed, the CRU participates by assuring that all of the aforementioned issues (integration, governance, quality and modeling) are properly analyzed.