How Healthcare Organizations Boost Data Access in the Cloud

Data can be found in abundance in healthcare, but understanding it and making sure it gets into the right hands at the right time remain high hurdles.

Interoperability is a persistent challenge, with 24% of healthcare organizations saying that systems don’t mesh well, leading to data silos, according to a 2024 Black Book Research report.

Providers struggle to keep pace with the exponential growth of data and issues around storage capacity, cost management, security and compliance. As they tackle applications featuring artificial intelligence (AI), an appropriate cloud model also becomes key to ensuring that everything is running as it should.

“I think cloud computing is really the base requirement in place because of the computational power and data storage that are needed to make this work at scale,” says Rema Padman, trustees professor of management science and healthcare informatics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.

Infrastructure requirements for electronic health record (EHR) systems, provider order entry, front-end visualizations and medical imaging applications are steering providers to the cloud. “I think that performance and cost issues for this convergence are driving the need to move to a different type of platform,” Padman says.

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Hackensack Meridian Health Improves Access to Data

For New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health, moving to the cloud has helped the organization make data curation and accessibility more seamless. “Having data in the cloud makes development of data and analytics assets and connectivity a lot easier and faster,” says Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI officer and chief data and analytics officer.

In 2022, Hackensack Meridian Health started to build a data analytics infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform and now has more than 475 data and analytics assets that live on the platform. The health system is systemically sunsetting its legacy on-premises data and analytics platform and shifting to the cloud, which it is finding to be more optimal and cost-effective, Sethi says. 

“The first and most valuable part about moving into the cloud is that we are able to build and deliver data and insights a lot faster,” he adds. “I no longer have to purchase hardware, wait to get them into racks and configure them before I can use them. Now, it all happens and is made available instantly with the swipe of a credit card.”

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Another key part of Hackensack Meridian Health’s cloud migration strategy was to consolidate its business intelligence and semantic layer, which it calls Ekam, a Sanskrit word that signifies a single source of truth. 

The health system is seeing tremendous benefits in the performance and computing power of the cloud. It stores and processes large volumes of data, and cloud tools such as Looker and BigQuery offer quicker access to the data, according to Sethi.

“We are an organization that relies on data-enabled insights to run our hospitals and to take care of our patients,” he says. “Getting these insights to our clinicians and workforce quickly and seamlessly is key, and being in the cloud gives us a huge advantage.”

In 2023, the organization decided to move its core applications into the cloud, including its EHR software. Sethi sees advantages to migrating technology assets beyond data and analytics.

“Our plan is to move the majority of our applications from our on-premises data centers into the cloud,” Sethi says. “There will be some applications that we will decide to host on-prem in a data center, and we will therefore continue to maintain a small on-prem footprint for applications that are not well suited to live in the cloud.”

Community Health Network Reduces Friction Points

Community Health Network operates more than 250 locations in central Indiana that include acute care hospitals, surgery centers, home care services and behavioral health facilities. It turned to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Dynamics 365 to improve communication with patients and gain access to data insights that can streamline the patient experience.

The goal was to eliminate friction points in the patient journey, according to Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer Dr. Patrick McGill.

In 2022, the organization decided to go with Dynamics 365 as a customer relationship management platform. Since it was already working with Microsoft, the move to Dynamics made the most sense.

“Dynamics really helps us work toward that goal of deeply knowing our patients, their preferences, when they’re interacting with the system, when they’re coming into the system, any gaps in care they might have or challenges they might experience,” McGill says.

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The platform also helps the health system with customer segmentation to understand which patients have certain conditions, such as cancer or other chronic illnesses, he says.

“How do you bring the human element back into healthcare? I think that’s what we're really striving for with a lot of these technologies, whether it’s using data to drive clinical insights or using data to be more efficient with our business,” McGill says.

Community Health Network moved off another enterprise data warehouse platform in 2024 to join Azure Databricks, a unified open analytics platform that lets organizations build, deploy and share data. “That has really set us up for the future to leverage other advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and some other capabilities,” he says.

The health system uses advanced data analytics in the cloud for operational reasons, such as how to predict and find gaps in financial performance, McGill says, and has built data models to help manage its workforce and predict staffing needs.

“Having all of that data in one platform will allow us to have a complete picture as we’re building some of these models – not just clinical or operational data, but really all of the data that we need to do this,” he says.

One Medical Automates Administrative Tasks with the Cloud

Membership-based national primary care provider One Medical has used Amazon Web Services since its founding in 2007, even before the tech giant bought the organization in 2023. One Medical relies on AWS to offer virtual care, secure messaging and on-demand video chats.

AWS simplifies provider workflows and reduces administrative work. It also allows them to spend more time with patients rather than typing notes or reviewing lengthy records, says One Medical Vice President of Engineering Deepak Alur.

The cloud platform allows providers to access data on a single screen. They can write notes, prescribe medications, order studies and evaluate test results. One Medical also used the cloud to build its EHR platform, which allows other physicians to access the system if a primary care doctor is unavailable.

“AWS enables One Medical to automate tasks in the cloud by providing scalable infrastructure for machine learning workflows,” Alur says. “The machine learning models deployed can extract critical information from insurance card scans, such as name and policy numbers, to improve patient onboarding. Automation reduces manual work, enhances efficiency and supports seamless operations.”

The organization is also testing ways to use large language models to recommend provider responses to patient messages and boost human interaction during telehealth.

Breaking down silos to access data in large documents remains a key challenge for providers, Alur adds.

“Healthcare interoperability still is largely based in the exchange of large documents,” he says. “This is extremely costly to review manually and often results in valuable information never being structured for analysis.”

AWS also builds interoperability for One Medical’s homegrown applications, such as patient-facing ones, staff and clinical software, and offline analytics and data systems, Alur adds. “Having these all be powered by AWS allows us to simplify the management and operations of our technology and helps make connecting these systems easier,” he says.