The use of data analytics to fuel digital transformation has moved well beyond a trend. The practice has become ubiquitous as healthcare organizations have embarked on digital transformation journeys.
According to a 2021 report from Sage Growth Partners, 85 percent of healthcare organizations said that having real-time, harmonized data for making informed operational decisions is extremely or very important to their organizations.
Why? The effective use of data analytics drives valuable business results — including improved efficiency in clinical workflows, heightened productivity, reduced costs and an enhanced patient experience — that deliver a competitive business edge.
To enable the effective use of data analytics, many organizations are employing modern data platforms, which provide capabilities such as nearly unlimited flexibility for data collection, clear visibility into data sets and data democratization to make analytics available to users across an organization. But perhaps the most valuable capability a modern data platform can provide is data governance: the establishment of clear rules about the access and use of data, as well as the enforcement of those rules.
“Governance is a cornerstone of the modern data platform,” says Rex Washburn, head of modern data platforms for CDW’s data practice. “If you don’t have data governance, you don’t have a modern data platform.”
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Governance Simplifies Compliance with Data Regulations
The governance that modern data platforms offer separates them from legacy data architectures. A modern platform can simplify and unify a healthcare organization’s data environment, enabling streamlined governance and security. By providing clear visibility into an organization’s data, a modern data platform enables administrators to precisely control access, making sure authorized users can employ analytics features while securing data from an unauthorized compromise.
Effective data governance also simplifies and enhances compliance with data safety and privacy regulations. The healthcare industry is heavily regulated, but even some large organizations don’t have formal data governance in place. The governance capabilities that a modern data platform offers can be particularly valuable in a frequently changing compliance environment that often challenges organizations to keep pace.
“A modern data platform helps organizations manage their data flexibly,” Washburn says. “As regulations change around data, governance and compliance, they’re able to comply with those regulations.”
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Combining the Benefits of Data Analytics and the Cloud
Modern data platforms provide cloud-based management of a healthcare organization’s data, delivering elastic scalability and modularity. When users can find the data they need quickly and easily, their analytics efforts become less burdensome and more likely to yield the results they’re looking for.
“We want to design the platform so that we can push data to the business at the speed of business,” Washburn says. “We need to be able to get them what they need, when they need it.”
The ability to provide data analytics capabilities to all users in an organization — not only data scientists or IT staff — is an essential element of the modern data platform. But if organizations are going to make data available to all users, they must ensure that the right data governance rules are in place and that those rules ae enforced. Modern data platforms achieve this objective.
“The technology is so advanced that an IT team can literally open up the entire data store to anybody while making sure they don’t have access to data they’re not supposed to see,” says Christopher Marcolis, head of analytics and data governance for CDW. “It creates a very open and collaborative data landscape where people actually can evaluate things.”
Ultimately, a modern data platform can help a healthcare organization align its analytics efforts to its business strategy, embed analytics into processes and clinical decision-making, and help the organization more effectively achieve its operational goals.
UP NEXT: Learn how modern data platforms can boost healthcare agility.
