Metadata Management and Data Governance - Data Governance: Creating Value from Information Assets - page 49

of the data, such as a geographical hierarchy making up different geo-
graphical regions of the United States (for example, the western region
is made up of California, Oregon, and Washington). A business rule is a
procedure or process that must be followed. For example, a business rule
might say that there will be no patients that are over 200 years old in the
database; anyone over 200 years old would be an error. Another example
of a business rule would be that any order over $100,000 in value must
have a vice president's approval. Business metadata provides the semantic
definition of the business data element. Business data is an element that
represents business values, such as patient demographics or encounters.
Patient demographics may have attributes such as race, age, or address.
Business metadata would provide the definition of race, age, or address.
For example, age could be defined as the current date and time minus the
birth date.
Business metadata should be:
• Searchable
• Easy to access and integrated
• Exposed
Searchable
Business metadata must be searchable to determine how many occur-
rences of the term exist. This search ability component is important to
support Fit for Purpose architecture versus a Single Version of the Truth.
Many corporations attempt to implement a Single Version of the Truth
data warehouse. Thus, for example, we would have one definition of
patient stay. However, the reality is that many healthcare environments
cannot support just one version of a term, such as patient stay . Therefore,
they implement a Fit for Purpose architecture where they have an enter-
prise definition of a term, such as patient stay . However, they also can
keep additional definitions of a term, such as patient stay . For example, a
patient checks into a hospital and registers; however, his treatment does
not begin until later. A billing person might define patient stay as the dif-
ference in time between the start of the treatment and the end of the treat-
ment. A clinical view might define patient stay as the difference in time
between when the patient registered and when the patient checked out
of the hospital. It is critical for the data Governance Board to know how
many different versions of patient stay there are.