Healthcare Records Governance and Retention Training Course

Course overview

Healthcare organisations must retain clinical, operational and research records for defensible periods while ensuring that information is available to authorised staff, protected from inappropriate access, and disposed of reliably when its retention obligation ends. Fragmented electronic health record repositories, scanned paper files, shared drives, email, imaging systems and third-party platforms make this difficult. Poor governance can compromise continuity of care, delay legal holds, increase storage cost, and expose the organisation to privacy, regulatory and litigation risk.

This five-day course equips participants to design and operate a healthcare records governance framework. Participants learn to inventory record classes; distinguish clinical, administrative and research records; interpret retention triggers; build a retention schedule; apply metadata and classification rules; manage legal holds; and plan defensible disposition. The course also addresses governance roles, access controls, audit trails, digitisation quality controls, vendor-held records, and the relationship between privacy obligations and records retention. Participants work with ISO 15489 principles, ISO 27799 healthcare information security guidance, and common capabilities in Microsoft Purview and OpenText Content Management.

Teaching combines instructor-led explanation with realistic healthcare scenarios, including a patient-record request, a litigation hold involving diagnostic images, and the closure of a clinical service. Participants progressively build a records governance pack for a healthcare provider: a records inventory, retention schedule extract, classification and metadata model, legal-hold workflow, disposition authorisation form, and 90-day implementation plan. This provides a practical set of documents that can be adapted for a hospital, clinic, laboratory, insurer, or healthcare network.

The course is designed for professionals who already work with healthcare information, records, compliance, quality, privacy or digital transformation and need to turn policy requirements into repeatable operating controls. It is equally valuable to managers seeking a clearer line of accountability, evidence for audit, and a disciplined approach to reducing unmanaged record holdings.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map healthcare record classes, systems of record, owners and information flows using a records inventory
• Construct a retention schedule with retention triggers, minimum periods, review dates and disposal actions
• Apply ISO 15489 principles to classification, metadata, authenticity, reliability and usability controls
• Design a legal-hold workflow that suspends routine disposition and documents release decisions
• Define role-based access, audit-trail and confidentiality requirements for clinical and administrative records
• Evaluate digitisation and migration controls for scanned files, legacy repositories and electronic health records
• Prepare defensible disposition documentation, including approval, destruction certificate and exception records
• Produce a 90-day healthcare records governance implementation plan with owners, milestones and measures

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Health Information Managers — who govern patient-record lifecycle controls and service performance
• Medical Records Managers — who need consistent retention, retrieval, scanning and disposal procedures
• Privacy and Data Protection Officers — who must reconcile privacy obligations with lawful retention requirements
• Healthcare Compliance Managers — who prepare evidence for regulatory reviews, audits and investigations
• Clinical Governance and Quality Managers — who rely on complete, trustworthy records to support safe care
• Digital Health and EHR Programme Managers — who must embed records controls in system migrations and new platforms

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have working experience of healthcare records, patient information, compliance, quality, privacy, clinical administration or an EHR-related project. They should understand basic concepts such as confidentiality, access permissions, audit trails, record ownership and retention periods, and be able to review policy documents and spreadsheet-based inventories. Familiarity with a local health records retention schedule or privacy law is useful but not essential. No legal qualification, coding skill, Microsoft Purview licence, OpenText system access, or prior formal records-management certification is required. Participants will work with supplied templates and realistic case materials.

Training methodology

The programme uses short instructor-led briefings followed by applied workshops built around a fictional healthcare provider with EHR, imaging, laboratory, paper archive and cloud collaboration records. Participants analyse sample policies, retention tables, audit logs and vendor clauses; make governance decisions in small groups; and test those decisions against privacy, clinical and legal scenarios. Facilitated peer review is used to challenge retention and disposal rationale. On day five, each participant assembles their governance pack and converts it into a prioritised 90-day action plan for their own organisation.

Course outline

Day 1: Healthcare records governance foundations

• Healthcare record lifecycle from creation to authorised disposition
• Clinical, administrative, financial and research record categories
• Records versus data, documents, copies and transitory information
• Governance roles using accountable owner and custodian models
• ISO 15489 principles for trustworthy records
• ISO 27799 controls for healthcare information security
• Records risk assessment across EHR, paper and cloud repositories

Workshop: Participants create a records landscape map identifying record classes, systems, owners, users and high-risk lifecycle gaps for a fictional hospital.

Day 2: Retention scheduling and classification

• Retention rule sources: legislation, regulators, contracts and clinical guidance
• Retention triggers, event dates and calculation logic
• Retention schedule structure and record-series definitions
• Patient age, episode closure and limitation-period considerations
• Functional classification schemes for healthcare services
• Metadata fields for record status, owner, sensitivity and disposal eligibility
• Handling duplicates, convenience copies and personal working files

Workshop: Participants draft a retention schedule extract and metadata profile for outpatient, laboratory, imaging and incident-management records.

Day 3: Privacy, access and legal hold controls

• Reconciling minimum retention with privacy minimisation principles
• Role-based access models for clinical and administrative records
• Audit logs, access monitoring and evidential chain of custody
• Legal hold triggers, notice content and acknowledgement tracking
• Suspending automated disposition during investigations and claims
• Release-of-hold decisions and resumption of disposal
• Responding to patient access requests without compromising record integrity

Workshop: Participants run a legal-hold tabletop involving a clinical negligence claim and produce a hold notice, custodian list and release checklist.

Day 4: Digital repositories, migration and disposition

• EHR, PACS, laboratory and enterprise-content repository recordkeeping controls
• Microsoft Purview retention labels and retention policies
• OpenText Content Management classification and disposition capabilities
• Scanning quality assurance, indexing and evidential equivalence
• Migration mapping, metadata preservation and validation testing
• Third-party processors, cloud vendors and records ownership clauses
• Destruction authorisation, certificates and exception management

Workshop: Participants assess a legacy records migration and design a disposition control pack covering approvals, exceptions, audit evidence and vendor responsibilities.

Day 5: Operating the governance programme

• Records governance policy architecture and supporting procedures
• RACI matrices for clinical, legal, privacy, IT and archive teams
• Control testing and internal audit evidence
• Key performance indicators for retrieval, holds, disposal and training
• Training and change management for frontline record creators
• Remediation prioritisation using risk, volume and regulatory impact
• Ninety-day implementation planning and executive reporting

Workshop: Participants complete and present a healthcare records governance pack with a prioritised 90-day implementation plan, named owners and success measures.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 15489, ISO 27799, Microsoft Purview, OpenText Content Management

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions