At one time, Johns Hopkins Health System’s five hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington area kept patient records on five different medical records systems, and each entity managed its own data. When these hospitals transitioned to one electronic system, Epic, the challenges with data governance were apparent. There were questions about who could access the data, who was permitted to use it and what processes were necessary to manage the data. The Data Trust Council was established in 2013 to govern information on Johns Hopkins Medicine’s 5.5 million patients. Valerie Smothers, who came to the school of medicine in 2001, manages the data governance process and the council’s projects as the data trust coordinator.

Tell me about your responsibilities as data trust coordinator for Johns Hopkins Medicine.

There is an operations team and there are four subcouncils that manage use of data and develop policy for research, stewardship, clinical operations and quality improvement, and security and privacy. I help to run and manage the work of the council and five other committees.

I also work to coordinate the efforts of nine data trust analytic teams. We want to make sure we have the capabilities and the infrastructure to start looking at next generation analytics for things like predictive modeling — knowing who is going to get sick before they get sick, so that we can intervene and have improved outcomes.

What type of data is involved?
The patient data that is in Epic is the biggest part of this data — for example, what patients were admitted for and on what date, clinical problems, their diagnosis, when they were discharged and which physician they saw.

Many clinicians have access to the Epic interface for interacting with patients. But Epic also has a tremendous wealth of data that can be used for research purposes, quality improvement and operations.

What resources are available for managers?

The data is captured in dashboards. There are dozens of dashboards developed for different purposes. Tableau is our tool of choice for creating data visualizations, because just looking at numbers can be kind of hard to digest. Tableau gives you the ability to see trends at the high level and drill down to see the details. The data can be used to make our operations more efficient, to make the care that we provide to patients of a higher quality and to enable cutting-edge research that explores not just the what but the why.

We want managers to be able to use data to improve their practice. Therefore, I want them to look at what we have developed, and know who participates on the analytic teams that are relevant to them. We have a wealth of resources at tableau.jhmi.edu/jhm . I recommend they start there. In addition, if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me and I am happy to connect people.

What is your background?

My background is in instructional design. I have been working on MedBiquitous, which was started here at Johns Hopkins. MedBiquitous is a standards development organization for health professions’ education and assessment. I was an independent contractor for a while and was doing work for the IRS and other organizations. I had been teaching both at a community college and at University of Maryland University College. In 2014, I became the data trust coordinator at Johns Hopkins.

What brings you joy at Johns Hopkins Medicine?

The work that I do has such a big impact on the institution. Being able to be a part of making data more accessible to our faculty and staff brings me joy — getting people to talk to one another and find common ground and move forward in a coordinated way brings me joy.