The healthcare industry is in a state of disruption. Its business systems are becoming quickly outdated as society moves toward digital channels for information, transactions, and interactions.
Patients expect high-quality care that is more efficient, accessible, and equitable. These expectations compel healthcare systems to embrace data-driven digital technologies that transform current care models, business processes, and patient and member experiences.
Healthcare executives must move with urgency to adopt a digital-first strategy that transforms how the healthcare industry interacts with patients and members.
A digital-first approach to healthcare (see Figure 1):
Figure 1
The digital-first model requires healthcare to move away from a system historically organized around payment rules and siloed services. We must reimagine a new model of care and payment system.
The transformed healthcare system will exhibit four key characteristics:
Six Benefits of Healthcare Digital Transformation
A digital transformation in healthcare will increase capacity, scalability, cost-efficiency, and interoperability in the following ways:
Healthcare data is complicated by disparate concepts and terms. It is also rife with data silos and poor data quality. These issues have made interoperability difficult and created barriers to digital transformation. The way to remove those barriers is to handle data as an enterprise asset that is inventoried, catalogued, and managed to be reliable and trustworthy. The more reliable and trustworthy data is, the better the results will be.
When you manage data as an asset, you achieve the following benefits:
It’s impossible to keep up with the explosive growth in data by increasing manpower alone. Fortunately, data management solutions have matured. Healthcare businesses can leverage existing staff and automate data management tasks by employing AI and ML to solve problems and complete complex data management activities that used to be impossible at an enterprise scale.
Figure 2
Data management is a core business function, not a technology endeavor. It cannot be consigned to IT where the tools, technology, and implementation are detached from clinical and business requirements. This requires a collaborative data management team structure that nonetheless retains clear areas of responsibility (see Figure 2).
When data management is done correctly, clinical and business users are the authorities over what their data means and how it is used; IT is accountable for the data management tools, data management infrastructure, and data management training.
Healthcare organizations are moving applications and data workloads to the cloud because the business and clinical benefits are clear. Doing so empowers the healthcare industry to:
The foundation of healthcare’s digital future is reliable and trustworthy data. The way you achieve reliable and trustworthy data is to govern it. Data governance ensures healthcare organizations support privacy rules, security, and complex regulations from end to end and meet evolving compliance requirements.
Data governance provides the ability to:
Informatica empowers healthcare organizations to succeed in their digital transformation journeys.
Cloud application integration: Providing faster patient diagnoses
A genetics research company needed to integrate enterprise data sources with complex workflows to expedite test results for faster patient diagnosis. To solve this issue, the company utilized Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Informatica Cloud Application Integration to orchestrate data flows between enterprise applications and a data warehouse. This minimized the time required to get results back to a physician.
Cloud analytics: Enabling more effective healthcare
Franciscan Alliance is a rapidly growing healthcare system in northern and central Indiana, as well as in eastern Illinois. In a drive to deliver high-quality care, Franciscan leveraged Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog and Intelligent Cloud Services. The organization built a complex analytics framework integrating paid claims with current patient encounters to point out potential areas of concern. The solution also helped the organization meet the demands of emerging situations, such as COVID-19 and CARES Act reporting requirements, in days rather than weeks or months.
Data governance: Delivering a timely, coordinated response
UNC Health, a statewide nonprofit healthcare system, needed to enhance data governance and enable self-service analytics for executives and business users. To solve this issue, the healthcare system integrated Informatica Data Catalog with Axon Data Governance to make cataloged data available and provide a collaborative shared view of data assets. This enables data analysts, developers, and architects to quickly find and understand data and expedite analysis, providing clear and accurate information to facilitate decision making.
Healthcare systems embarking on the digital transformation journey will make quick progress by following six steps:
The Informatica Intelligent Data Cloud is the healthcare industry’s most complete and modular enterprise data solution. The AI-driven platform ensures data is trusted, protected, governed, accessible, timely, relevant, and actionable—enabling healthcare organizations to deliver faster and better data-driven digital transformation outcomes.
