Playbook

Data Governance Roles & Clinical Data Quality Checklist

A practical playbook that defines core governance roles, explains a minimal data-lineage mapping, and provides an interactive, saveable clinical data quality checklist and incident-response play to make clinical data reliable for safe decisions.

Interactive Tool

Data Governance Roles & Clinical Data Quality Checklist

Purpose

This playbook helps clinical teams clarify who owns and looks after clinical data, map basic lineage, run a concise data-quality check, and record incident-response steps when data issues could affect care. Use this interactive checklist to make checks repeatable, auditable, and actionable.

Who should use this

Data stewards, data owners, clinical analysts, quality and safety leads, and operational managers responsible for clinical data used in care, reporting, or decision support.

How to use

Complete the role fields and a short lineage summary once per new data asset or when systems change.
Run the quality checklist on the cadence appropriate for the asset (daily for real‑time feeds that affect care, weekly/ monthly for analytic datasets).
If an issue is found, complete the incident-response fields and follow escalation steps.

Organization unit / department

e.g., Emergency Department, Radiology, Laboratory

Data asset / dataset name

Use the canonical name used by your data catalog or EHR

Data owner (person or role)

Who is accountable for decisions about using this data? Provide name and role.

Data steward (operational custodian)

Who ensures the dataset is maintained, documented, and fit for purpose?

Primary analyst / owner of downstream models

Who consumes or transforms this data for reporting or decision support?

Short lineage summary

Identify source systems, key transformations, and target systems (one or two sentences). Example: 'Orders from EHR → ETL cleaning (timestamp normalization) → Observational table used by analytic model X.'

Date of this check

YYYY-MM-DD

Completeness (presence of required fields)

1 = very poor, 5 = complete

1.0 10.0

Plausibility / accuracy

1 = many implausible values or obvious errors, 5 = values appear correct

1.0 10.0

Timeliness (up-to-date for intended use)

1 = stale / delayed, 5 = meets timeliness needs

1.0 10.0

Consistency across systems

Do values reconcile where the same data appears in multiple systems?

Did you identify one or more issues during this check?

If No, skip the incident-response fields; otherwise complete them.

Yes

Issue description (if any)

Describe the problem, affected fields or records, sample values, and how you discovered it.

Issue severity

Select how this issue could affect clinical decisions or patient safety

Immediate actions taken (check all that apply)

Select what you did as part of initial containment and notification

Isolated affected records or paused use

Notified data owner

Notified clinical leadership / safety

Opened IT / integration ticket

Saved relevant logs and evidence

Other (describe below)

Escalation required to governance board or safety committee?

Select Yes to trigger formal escalation workflows per local policy

Planned follow-up / resolution date

YYYY-MM-DD — leave blank if not applicable

Person completing this check

Name and contact (e.g., email)

Submitter role

e.g., Data Steward, Clinical Analyst

Additional notes

Any contextual details not captured above

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Data Governance Roles & Clinical Data Quality Checklist