Technology continues to change how we work and play. As consumers, we are living in an Information Generation that is more digitally connected to each other through the things we use and the experiences they enable. For businesses, all this data creates a clearer picture of our customers and what they both need and want. And, for healthcare organizations, gaining that clear picture on a particular patient in real-time can be critical at the point of care.
The challenge for many organizations, whether healthcare or not, is how to best pool all of their disparate data in a navigable way so they can take action on it. If the information remains siloed, we will miss out on some of the greatest opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives.
But with healthcare data growing 48% a year through 2020, healthcare providers need to find more efficient approaches to storing, managing, sharing, and analyzing all of the data being collected across the care continuum. One approach is a data lake — a technology infrastructure that incorporates any information generated across the health system, including data imported from outside sources and services. This enterprise-wide approach reveals insight on performance indicators and the impacts of patient care interventions, improving risk management and allowing the organization to deliver affordable, higher quality care.
Leading organizations are building data lake infrastructure to gain that holistic perspective and to reduce time to insight — as they now have the ability to analyze multiple variables and quickly identify trends, patterns, and correlations.
Let me give you a specific example of an organization that is helping customers both identify gaps in care, quality, data integrity, and financial performance as well as using their own unique capabilities to find resolutions: Inovalon.
Yes, Inovalon is an EMC customer with an IaaS cloud automated by the vRealize Suite, powered by vSphere, and built on a foundation of VNX and XtremIO. They also protect their environment with Avamar, Data Domain, and RecoverPoint and secure their environment with RSA. But, perhaps most compelling is that they have built a data lake on an EMC Isilon cluster and powered by Pivotal HD.
What I think is most significant about Inovalon’s story is how fast they have arrived at an outcome. They are applying advanced, big data analytics and a data-driven intervention platform to achieve meaningful improvement. With healthcare data on more than half of the U.S. population and more than 9.7 billion healthcare events around the country, Inovalon helps physicians, accountable care organizations, health plans, researchers, pharma and life sciences companies turn their data into insight and that insight into action. And that means people’s lives will be better.
As technology advances, the healthcare industry needs to stay at the forefront of using innovations like data lakes to tie together our data into that complete picture. By doing so, we can achieve milestones like improved diagnoses and treatment options at the individual level, ultimately continuing to enable healthier lives.
That is what it truly means to put our data to work.
