The future of patient data: 3 pillars of successful analytics implementation

In the COVID-19 era, health systems recognize that existing data infrastructure is inadequate. Today, healthcare consumers are more empowered with the health data readily available through healthcare information tools and devices. On the other hand, data is abundant for health systems and physicians, coming in from multiple sources - patient-care applications, personal and medical equipment, hospital administration, operations, supply chain, logistics, referrals and human resource management. Health systems have obtained data from various sources thanks to technological disruptions and open FHIR APIs in the last decade. What are the technical criteria that will allow healthcare data to benefit both consumers and health systems? They brought together data from disparate sources and created supply chain workflows for delivering PPE kits, maintaining medical inventories, tracking patients in need of COVID-19 testing, improving virtual and telehealth platforms to care for routine visits, and installing remote devices to coordinate eldercare and vulnerable patient care. In the COVID-19 era, health systems recognize that existing data infrastructure is inadequate in meeting the different needs of several stakeholders. The big tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce provide the infrastructure that includes data ingestion in multiple formats, data transformation to healthcare standard formats, storage, and finally sharing them across users in FHIR format. A health cloud is a unified repository of data across systems and care settings. All this big data deployed in a cloud infrastructure brings us to the world of health clouds which is now coming to the forefront of healthcare technology as the next level of evolution. The digitization of healthcare data is now at the crux of adopting the three major technology pillars: normalizing data using standard terminologies, facilitating interoperability with FHIR standards, and finally hosting them on the cloud infrastructure