The clinical side of the world should be just as concerned about information life cycle management as the IT side. It’s often treated as a — kind of like a back end or back office or IT kind of environment because, hey, it’s got the word information in there, and so it must be information technology. Uh, in the world order of value driven care and the area — era of meaningful use, especially as we get to Stages 2 and 3, we know that, uh, the information life cycle is going to be driven not by IT, but by clinical staff. MU, accountable care, patients enter medical home. These are all driven by clinical. There is very little about administrative or other requirements in there.

So the reason why, uh, clinical folks need to be part of your governance process, they need to be part of your decision-making process, et cetera, is that they know where the biggest needs are with direct patient communication. And so what happens many times is that IT people make decisions around IT, and generally, ILM people will make decisions around record keeping. But you need the clinical folks in the middle to make sure that whatever decisions are being made about where storage occurs, how quickly is data accessible, what are the retrieval requirements. Is it a three-second requirement? Is it a two-second requirement?

If you’re taking care of patients all day long, there’s a huge difference between three seconds and half a second, and if you don’t have the right clinical people involved in there, the decisions get made to say, “Oh, you know what? We don’t really need to worry about — if our system ever goes down, we’ll restore backup within 24 hours,” and a clinical person sitting in the room is going to say, “What, are you kidding? We have no paper records. There’s nothing to be — there’s nothing for us to use for 24 hours. We’re going to stop working if you do that,” and if you don’t have the clinical person in there, all kinds of crazy decisions get made, and then people wonder, “Well, why was this decision made?” Because there was no clinical person in that governance group.

So clinical people have to care about this because data is a valuable asset, and it’s theirs more than anybody else’s to be able to control and use.