MCYS BI Project
The Ministry of Children and Youth Services (MCYS) has been hard at work creating a comprehensive approach for child and youth mental health (CYMH). Service providers are eligible for government reimbursement in order to ensure children age 18 and under receive the mental health care and support they need.
As part of this initiative, the MCYS collects standardized reports from mental health service providers. These reports include details to help improve the delivery of MCYS services, and include information about missed consent forms, clients who have active program history but are missing brief intakes, and more. In order to protect anonymity and other sensitive healthcare information, it’s vital that service providers have the proper business intelligence (BI) solution in place.
This article will look at the requirements of MCYS/CYMH BI and explain what your practice needs to do to be in compliance with their standards.
Functions of a BI Solution
Your Business Intelligence solution will receive anonymized client and service data from your existing client information systems. Data collected includes information around the client demographics, services rendered, and more. This data is granular down to the individual level, which is why it’s important to ensure personally identifiable information is properly handled and anonymized.
Data quality will be verified, and the data will be aggregated to meet the needs of the CYMH program. Your BI solution should handle all of this automatically, allowing it to become a standard part of your service management platform.
Protecting Anonymity
The anonymization process allows the MCYS to account for the youth population without sacrificing the personal privacy of individuals. The anonymization process is also known as “hashing,” which is essentially a type of encryption where meaningful data appears as gibberish to those without the proper key to decode it.
Hashing provides protection for Personal Health Information (PHI) as any third party who does not have clearance to view the data would also lack the key to decipher the encryption, meaning that the PHI is still protected even if it is lost or stolen.
To meet MCYS standards, this encryption needs to apply to data both when it is being stored and when it is being transmitted. To do otherwise is to risk the security of your data. Data must also be protected by role-based access controls and ownership permissions. These are safeguards that should help to ensure that data is only seen by the appropriate parties.
Standards for Data Quality
The MCYS has set strict requirements around the quality, consistency, and completeness of data collected as part of this initiative. If you’re providing data to the MCYS, you’ll need to make sure your data meets these standards. Data quality verification should be built into your Business Intelligence solution, as should your anonymization tools and security/access controls.
For a deeper dive into the MCYS BI initiative, including details around the data quality standards and more, see this PDF from the Ministry of Children and Youth Services or take this at-home training module on the initiative’s key performance indicators.
If you’re searching for a ready-made solution to these MCYS BI requirements, it’s time to take a closer look at EMHware. Our Business Intelligence solution has everything you need to ensure compliance for data quality, security, and anonymity so you can easily take part in the MCYS BI initiative.
