Companion guide
Workshop Facilitation Guide
A practical guide for running a multidisciplinary Health Data Operability Maturity Assessment workshop, establishing a defensible current position and agreeing the next capability improvements.
1. Purpose of this guide
This guide supports facilitators running a group assessment using the Health Data Operability Maturity Assessment. The workshop helps a multidisciplinary group establish how well health data remains meaningful, interpretable and usable as it moves between people, processes, systems and organisations, and as it persists over time.
The objective is not to obtain the highest possible maturity profile.
The objective is to establish the most credible current position, understand why that position exists, identify where documented expectations differ from actual practice, and agree practical next steps.
The assessment considers six dimensions: semantic governance, context capture, process awareness, accountability and stewardship, lifecycle continuity and preservation, and fitness assurance. Each is considered against five levels: Reactive, Aware, Defined, Sustained and Anticipatory.
An uneven profile is expected. It is usually more informative than a single summary measure.
2. Workshop principles
Evidence over aspiration
Answer according to what happens in practice, not what policy, architecture or governance documentation says should happen.
Capability over technology
Modern platforms do not prove operability. Focus on whether meaning, context and usability survive change.
Cumulative maturity
Higher-level practice does not compensate for missing foundations. Record advanced examples, but do not use them to bypass lower-level gaps.
Real examples over impressions
Test general claims against recent migration, integration, service change, supplier transition, analytics or AI use.
Disagreement is useful evidence.
It may indicate inconsistent practice, local variation, poor visibility, unclear accountability or genuinely different operating contexts. Record significant disagreement rather than smoothing it away.
3. Participants and roles
A useful workshop normally involves 6 to 12 people. Representation should match the scope and collectively cover how data is created, interpreted, moved, transformed, governed, preserved and reused.
Potential participants
- Clinical or care professionals
- Operational service representatives
- Data, enterprise or solution architects
- Information governance and data governance
- Integration and analytics specialists
- Records or information management
- Programme or transformation leads
- Application or service owners
- Digital clinical safety representatives where relevant
Facilitator
- Explains the method and protects the evidence standard
- Manages time and balanced participation
- Tests general claims with examples
- Records the agreed response and material disagreement
- Prevents premature solution design
Assessment sponsor
Defines why the assessment is being undertaken, confirms scope and attendance, and owns the organisational response. Seniority should not determine responses.
Recorder
For larger workshops, a separate recorder can capture evidence references, unresolved questions, examples, disagreement and potential next steps while the facilitator manages discussion.
4. Preparation
Define the scope
Agree the assessment title, unit being assessed, organisation or service, date, facilitator, participants and, critically, the priority data in scope. Avoid defining the scope simply as “all data”.
- Medication data
- Diagnoses
- Referrals and discharge information
- Pathology results and observations
- Care plans and demographic data
- Imaging information
Circulate material in advance
Send the purpose, six dimensions, five maturity levels, response scale, agreed scope, priority data and workshop principles. Avoid encouraging participants to prepare arguments for a desired outcome.
Ask participants to bring evidence
Useful evidence can include data definitions, terminology mappings, data dictionaries, lineage, process models, interface specifications, migration specifications, preservation plans, stewardship records, decision logs, audit results, data quality reports and assurance evidence.
Do not include patient-identifiable information in workshop notes or evidence descriptions.
5. Suggested half-day agenda
| Activity | Suggested time |
|---|---|
| Welcome, purpose and scope | 15 minutes |
| Explain the assessment method | 15 minutes |
| Semantic governance | 20 minutes |
| Context capture | 20 minutes |
| Process awareness | 20 minutes |
| Short break | 10 minutes |
| Accountability and stewardship | 20 minutes |
| Lifecycle continuity and preservation | 20 minutes |
| Fitness assurance | 20 minutes |
| Anti-pattern check | 20 minutes |
| Review the maturity profile | 20 minutes |
| Agree priorities and next steps | 30 minutes |
| Close and confirm follow-up | 10 minutes |
Indicative duration: approximately 3 hours 40 minutes. For a complex national, regional or multi-organisational scope, two sessions may be preferable to rushed discussion.
6. Opening the workshop
1Navigation, not judgement
A lower evidenced level is useful if it accurately identifies work that matters. Inflating the position makes the exercise less useful.
2Profiles can be uneven
Different dimensions may legitimately sit at different levels. The objective is not a visually attractive profile.
3Documented is not practised
Policy may describe an expectation without demonstrating consistent practice. Good practice may also exist without being formalised.
4Not known is valid
Do not convert uncertainty into an optimistic assumption. Lack of organisational knowledge is itself informative.
7. Explaining the response scale
| Response | Facilitation meaning |
|---|---|
| Not in place | The practice does not happen, or happens only by chance. |
| Partly | The practice occurs in some areas or some of the time. Often appropriate where there is substantial local variation. |
| In place | The practice happens consistently under normal operating conditions. |
| Holds under pressure | The practice has continued through system change, migration, staff turnover, delivery pressure, organisational change or supplier transition. |
| Not known | Nobody present can provide a sufficiently reliable answer. Record the uncertainty and identify how it might be resolved. |
Ask whether a policy, standard or procedure says the practice should happen. Do not alter the practice response simply because documentation exists.
8. Running the six dimensions
Use the same basic facilitation pattern for every dimension: read the definition, begin at Aware, ask for evidence, record documented status separately, continue through higher levels, agree confidence, then capture evidence and important notes.
Semantic governance
Focus on whether different systems and teams retain a consistent understanding of data.
- Where do meanings differ between systems?
- Who knows about those differences?
- Are local codes mapped to recognised terminologies?
- Are definitions and mappings versioned?
- Could historic meaning be reconstructed?
- How is semantic change assessed before implementation?
Watch for participants treating use of a terminology standard alone as evidence of semantic governance.
Context capture
Explore whether the information needed to interpret data travels with the data.
- Can we tell who created the information and when?
- Do we know the method by which it was produced?
- Is original intent recorded?
- Are constraints on use visible?
- Does provenance survive transformation?
- Could someone unfamiliar with the original environment interpret the data correctly?
Process awareness
Examine whether workflow context is preserved alongside data.
- Can we identify where in the process information was created?
- Are real workflows documented, including workarounds?
- Do systems reflect how work actually happens?
- What happens at organisational handovers?
- Do receiving teams need to telephone someone to understand what arrived?
- Are process models maintained as practice changes?
Do not equate process awareness with having a process diagram somewhere.
Accountability and stewardship
Explore whether responsibility for maintaining meaning is explicit and durable.
- Who owns the decision?
- What can the steward actually decide?
- Where are decision rights recorded?
- What happens when the steward leaves?
- Are governance decisions made before or after deployment?
- Can anyone demonstrate whether governance decisions are followed?
Lifecycle continuity and preservation
Examine whether meaning survives system and organisational change.
- What happens to context during migration?
- Are retired code sets and reference data retained?
- Can historic information still be interpreted?
- Are preservation requirements defined when systems are acquired?
- Is preserved meaning tested after migration?
- Do supplier contracts address exit, portability and preservation?
Successful transfer of records is not evidence that meaning has been preserved.
Fitness assurance
Explore whether data is demonstrated to be suitable for each intended use.
- Who decides whether data is fit for a new purpose?
- Are known limitations visible to users?
- Is fitness reassessed when the use changes?
- What happens before data is used by an automated system or AI?
- Is assurance continuous or a one-off exercise?
- Are downstream problems fed back to the source?
9. Managing disagreement
- Clarify scope. Are participants describing different systems, departments, pathways, regions, data types or time periods?
- Ask for examples. Move from opinion to observable practice.
- Test consistency. If something happens in one service but not another, Partly may be appropriate.
- Test resilience. If practice disappears during migration, staff turnover or delivery pressure, it may not meet Holds under pressure.
- Use Not known where appropriate. Do not manufacture consensus.
- Record material dissent. If credible disagreement remains, note it and reduce confidence where appropriate.
10. Anti-pattern check
Complete the anti-pattern section after the six dimensions. It provides a reality check against recent experience rather than an automatic downgrade.
- Read the question.
- Ask for recent examples.
- Agree whether it was Not observed, Observed once, Recurring or Not known.
- Record relevant context.
- Review any flags produced by the toolkit.
When a flag appears, ask:
“Does this change our understanding of the dimension, or can we explain why the assessed level still stands?”
Where the level stands, record the rationale.
11. Reviewing the profile
The constraining dimension
Ask why the dimension is lower, what depends on it, whether it is genuinely the underlying constraint, and whether improving another dimension first would make more practical sense. The toolkit’s identified constraining dimension is a discussion aid, not an immutable conclusion.
Claimed versus evidenced maturity
Where claimed maturity is higher, explore why documented intent has not become routine practice. Where evidenced maturity is higher, explore whether good practice depends on individuals and should be formalised.
Uneven maturity
Ask whether the profile’s shape makes organisational sense. Unexpected differences can reveal local excellence, siloed governance, undocumented practice, dependency problems or scope ambiguity.
Automated and AI use
Pay particular attention to dimensions below Sustained where the organisation intends to rely on automated interpretation. At higher maturity, meaning should increasingly be recoverable computationally rather than reconstructed by skilled people.
12. Agreeing next steps
The final stage is not to design a complete transformation programme. Identify a manageable set of actions that would materially improve operability.
- Is this genuinely the next capability we need?
- Would completing it remove an important constraint?
- What evidence would demonstrate improvement?
- Who should own the action?
- Is the action within this group’s authority?
- Does it depend on another action?
As a guide, three to six agreed priorities are normally more useful than a long improvement list.
13. Closing and follow-up
Before finishing, confirm the assessment scope, low-confidence areas, unresolved questions, evidence still to be obtained, the constraining dimension, material claimed/evidenced gaps, unresolved flags, agreed priority actions, owners and the trigger for review.
Where organisational policy permits, retain the assessment export, generated report, action decisions and references to supporting evidence.
After the workshop
Do not silently change workshop responses. Where new evidence emerges, reconvene relevant participants, record an agreed revision, or run a new assessment if the change is substantial.
Repeat the assessment after meaningful change such as major system replacement, migration, organisational restructure, new cross-organisational sharing, major analytics deployment, AI or automated decision support, new stewardship arrangements, or significant policy or regulatory change.
14. Collapsible facilitation prompts
Use these prompts selectively. They are intended to keep the discussion evidence-led without turning the workshop into an interrogation.
Testing practice
- What actually happens?
- How consistent is that?
- Would every service say the same?
- What happened the last time this was tested by change?
Testing evidence
- What could we point to?
- Where is that recorded?
- Could someone outside this room verify it?
Testing resilience
- Does this depend on particular individuals?
- Would it survive staff turnover?
- What happens during migration?
- Has this held under delivery pressure?
Testing meaning
- Would the receiving team interpret this in the same way?
- What context would they need?
- Can that context be recovered from the data itself?
Testing governance
- Who has the decision right?
- Who is accountable if this is wrong?
- How do we know the decision is being followed?
Testing automation readiness
- Could a machine recover the same meaning without asking someone?
- What assumptions would an automated consumer have to make?
- Can fitness for this use be determined before the data is used?
15. Behaviours the facilitator should avoid
- Aiming for a predetermined maturity level
- Averaging different opinions
- Using voting as the default method of resolving disagreement
- Assuming documented policy represents actual practice
- Treating technology deployment as proof of capability
- Treating one successful project as organisation-wide maturity
- Suppressing inconvenient examples
- Converting uncertainty into a positive answer
- Allowing seniority to determine responses
- Turning every statement into a solution-design exercise
- Rushing the anti-pattern discussion
- Reducing the final output to a single maturity number
16. Printable facilitator checklist
Use the button in the page header to print this checklist on its own.
Health Data Operability Maturity Assessment
Workshop Facilitator Checklist
Before the workshop
During the workshop
Before closing
Key follow-up notes
17. Suggested opening and closing scripts
Opening
Today’s purpose is not to prove that we are mature. It is to establish where our current capability genuinely stands and what would most usefully improve it.
We are assessing whether the meaning of our data survives changes in systems, people, processes, organisations and uses.
The assessment distinguishes between what our documentation says should happen and what we can demonstrate happens in practice. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.
Where we disagree, that is useful. It may tell us that practice varies, evidence is weak, or different parts of the organisation see the same capability differently.
Please use real examples wherever possible. If nobody in the room knows the answer, we will record Not known rather than guess.
The result will be a profile across six dimensions and a small number of practical next steps. It is a navigation tool, not a judgement of the organisation or the people in it.
Closing
We now have a view of the organisation based on the evidence and experience available in this workshop.
The important output is not simply the maturity profile. It is the combination of the profile, the areas where confidence is limited, the differences between documented expectations and actual practice, the anti-patterns observed, and the actions we have agreed.
Before we close, we should be clear about which findings need further evidence, which actions have owners, and when we expect to revisit this assessment.
If the assessment has revealed uncertainty or disagreement, that should be treated as useful information rather than something to be edited out of the result.