| | AUGUST 201919CIOReviewBy Dave Henderson, CIO, Millennium HealthTAKING DATA OUT OF THE DATA CENTER TO BUILD CUSTOMER-FACING SOLUTIONS IN HEALTHCAREThe current transformation in information technology can be thought of as a 5th Industrial Revolution that is affecting all business sectors, including healthcare. According to the United States Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, in the past decade adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology by office-based physicians expanded from just around one-quarter to over 90% of practices. Patients are also increasingly relying on technology for their health care needs, with nearly half reporting that they had recently used online applications to communicate with their clinicians or make appointments. In addition, wearable devices are now creating additional data. Finally, diagnostic instruments are generating more data than ever before. Patient-generated health data, instrument data, EHR operations data, and results from diagnostic and laboratory testing contribute to increasing amounts of data in the healthcare space. This convergence of scientific data and operational data has affected every aspect of IT management in the healthcare space, from data acquisition and processing to analytics that integrate clinical and enterprise data. To respond to the exponential increase in data-generating sources, healthcare companies were required to make significant capital investments in the infrastructure needed to process the enormous amounts of data being generated on a daily basis. Such investments began with procurement and provisioning of multi-thousand node clusters requiring petabyte-level storage, but such purchases led to other needs. The rate at which data are produced often quickly surpasses the capacity of small companies to manage the needs of such hardware, including HVAC requirements, data backup and archiving, as well as data security and basic administrative tasks.The migration to cloud providers addressed some of these basic issues such as provisioning, but new challenges for IT professionals emerged, including archiving, security and administration of cloud-based infrastructures. Meanwhile, standard enterprise issues, which, for the healthcare sector, involve ensuring compliance with government agencies, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and commercial payers such as insurance companies, still require attention. Perhaps most importantly, how to leverage all these disparate data in a meaningful way became the largest challenge for legacy IT teams. Implementation of extensible platforms was the action that allowed IT teams to provide secure, scalable data management solutions that required only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed and in turn freed time and budget that could be devoted to actual business processes and improving customer experience.What does the ability to have an application or platform scale from a 1,000 to 100,000 node cluster on demand without IT intervention, or having access to a data lake that securely integrates data across scientific and customer platforms, mean for the average company in the healthcare sector? In essence, the removal of human capital Dave Henderson
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