In the healthcare field, having a comprehensive data strategy is paramount. Data can be a blessing or a curse to healthcare organizations, depending on how well they manage it. Meanwhile, data is the key to personalized medicine, breakthrough research, and effective population health management. On the other hand, data can be a major source of risk. Inadequate data security can put sensitive patient information at risk, undermine trust in healthcare providers, and lead to poor treatment decisions.
To unlock the value of data and reduce risk, IT leaders need to develop a robust data strategy that considers the following areas:
- Data governance and compliance
- Data integration and interoperability
- Data analysis and insights
- Data security and disaster recovery
Learn more about how to approach each of these areas. Specifically, we'll discuss how the AWS Cloud can help healthcare teams succeed when it comes to data strategy.
Data governance and compliance in healthcare
In healthcare, establishing strong data governance policies is essential. Data governance refers to how an organization manages who has control over what data and to what extent. Data governance is about minimizing both malicious and accidental changes to data. The current best practice is to follow the principle of least privilege. The idea is to give users only the level of data access they need and no more.
In healthcare, maintaining tightly controlled governance policies is core to having a robust data strategy. Healthcare organizations also have the added challenge of ensuring compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, which are designed to protect sensitive personal information. Promoting healthy data governance and compliance is difficult without the right tools.
Fortunately, AWS has many solutions for data governance and compliance. Tools like AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations make it easy to set up, automate, and manage scalable governance policies from a single location. AWS also has services such as AWS CloudTrail for auditing AWS API usage that may indicate tampering with governance or compliance policies, and AWS Config for staying on top of the configuration of your AWS resources. Ultimately, healthcare organizations need clear visibility into their data governance and compliance practices and simple tools to implement the best possible setup. AWS makes this possible.
Data integration and interoperability
Many healthcare organizations today are plagued by data silos and poorly integrated systems. There are many potential sources of information for healthcare leaders to consider, including electronic health records (EHRs), testing systems, and wearable devices. When data sources aren't integrated, analysts don't see the big picture and can't help providers and executives make strong clinical decisions. Healthcare data teams need tools that can integrate data from disparate sources while leaving room for nuanced analysis and data reduction.
Once again, AWS provides the answer. The platform offers tools such as his AWS Glue for advanced ETL, AWS Lake Formation for quickly setting up a secure data lake, and Amazon Kinesis for ingesting streaming data at scale. These are the types of tools you need to build an efficient and secure end-to-end data ecosystem, regardless of the speed or amount of data. Healthcare organizations need to consider future integration and interoperability, especially as healthcare becomes increasingly decentralized.
Data analysis and insights
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for healthcare organizations today is leveraging data analytics to generate insights for patient care, operational efficiency, and research. The latest AI/ML capabilities have made advanced analytical techniques more accessible than ever to predict outcomes, personalize treatment, and improve healthcare delivery.
AWS enables healthcare organizations to process, analyze, and visualize data in a variety of ways. This flexibility reduces complexity and speeds time to insight. This is important in medical care, where every moment can mean the difference between life and death. Amazon Athena is one of AWS's most powerful analytics services, allowing users to directly analyze and manipulate data in their S3 buckets. On the data warehousing and big data processing side, AWS has Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift respectively. Amazon QuickSight is your go-to solution for building intuitive dashboards and visualizations from advanced analytics. Understanding these analytical tools and more is a way for healthcare organizations to derive value from their data, rather than building a data vault with information they will never use.
Data security and disaster recovery
As data use cases in healthcare expand, so do data security and disaster recovery strategies. Data teams need to keep medical data safe from all types of breaches and cyber threats. Additionally, in the event of an unexpected disaster, the ability to quickly recover from reliable backups is critical to ensuring data availability and continuity of care.
AWS has no shortage of security or disaster recovery solutions. AWS IAM is at the heart of nearly every AWS cloud environment, and tools like Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector help IT teams address anomalous activity and vulnerabilities across their architecture. Additionally, AWS has built a redundant physical infrastructure. Healthcare organizations can build on this foundation with automated backups by making smart architectural decisions that keep services online even when disaster inevitably occurs.
About Anthony Ross
Anthony Loss is Director of Solutions Strategy at ClearScale. He has experience helping clients reduce their IT spending, increase business agility, accelerate innovation, and reduce risk. Mr. Los holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Illinois Institute of Technology and a master's degree in business administration from Dominican University.