Boost Patient Analytics with Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare

By 2025, the healthcare industry is expected to account for 30% of global data volume, growing at a 36% CAGR, surpassing other sectors. 

Now, all this data holds tremendous potential to transform patient care and power new innovations. But healthcare organizations are struggling under the weight of this flood of complex, siloed data. How can they hope to manage it all, let alone analyze it for insights? 

Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare, now HIPAA compliant as of February 2024, provides a unified cloud-based platform tailor-made for healthcare data analytics. With stringent privacy and security standards, Microsoft Fabric assures customers their data is protected according to industry best practices.  

In this post, we’ll explore how this HIPAA-compliant Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare can help healthcare organizations finally harness the power of their data to revolutionize medicine and improve patient outcomes in a secure manner. 

Ready to unlock the potential of your healthcare data with Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare? Let’s dive in. 

The Healthcare Data Explosion

Healthcare organizations are faced with an explosion of data coming from a proliferating array of sources. By some estimates, healthcare data is being produced at a rate of 36% compound growth annually, projected to reach the zettabyte scale in the near future. This data comes from sources including: 

• Electronic Health Records (EHRs) 

• Medical imaging systems like X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs 

• Clinical trials and medical research 

• Genomics and multi-omics datasets 

• Wearables, remote monitoring devices, and medical IoT 

• Administrative, operational, and financial data 

• Public health and population health records 

Managing and deriving value from such massive, varied, and siloed data presents a huge challenge. Most healthcare organizations struggle just to store and process their data, let alone analyze it for meaningful insights to improve patient care and outcomes. Up to 90% of healthcare data can reside in inaccessible silos. 

Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare aims to solve this by unifying healthcare data and making it usable. With its secure data lake capabilities and suite of analytics tools, Microsoft Fabric finally enables healthcare organizations to tap into the power of their data. Key capabilities include: 

• Ingesting and consolidating data from across modalities and standards like FHIR, DICOM, and OMOP 

• Applying AI and analytics to extract insights from unstructured data 

• Enabling collaboration and controlled sharing of de-identified data 

• Reducing storage costs while maintaining regulatory compliance 

With Microsoft Fabric, healthcare providers can achieve the promise of data-driven medicine – leveraging their full data assets to drive better care, research, and outcomes for every patient. 

Challenges with Healthcare Data

Healthcare data presents immense obstacles due to its sheer volume and complexity. As industry experts state, the industry is moving from digitization to an era of “datafication”. 

While the average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million across industries, healthcare suffers a staggering average of $10.93 million per breach according to IBM. This highlights the need for robust data security. 

Variety poses a major challenge – data comes from diverse sources like medical records, prescriptions, and test reports, in different formats. Integrating this data is difficult without a unified platform like Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake data store. 

Velocity also hampers healthcare, as new data is produced continuously at high speeds. Real-time analytics enabled by Fabric’s AI and machine learning is key to leveraging this data. 

Veracity, or reliability of data, varies greatly in healthcare. Fabric provides advanced data quality tools to enable validation and cleaning. 

Strict privacy requirements must be met, requiring deidentification and controlled access. Fabric ensures regulatory compliance and security via encryption, controlled access and Purview’s auditing. 

Sophisticated techniques like predictive analytics and AI/machine learning are essential for accurate analysis and forecasting. Fabric is purpose-built for such advanced analytics. 

The costs of legacy infrastructure cannot scale to meet healthcare’s vast data needs. Fabric’s unified platform reduces costs by consolidating systems while remaining flexible and scalable. 

By 2030, healthcare analytics is projected to reach $50 billion, demonstrating the industry’s data challenges and urgent need for modern data platforms like Microsoft Fabric that address these multifaceted healthcare data obstacles. 

Microsoft Fabric: A Unified Data Platform for Healthcare

Microsoft Fabric delivers a cloud-based platform that addresses the unique challenges of healthcare data head-on. It provides: 

• Scalable and elastic storage – Store any amount of data efficiently. Add storage as needs grow. 

• High performance – Query and analyze huge datasets in seconds. 

• Unified architecture – Integrate siloed systems into a cohesive data ecosystem. 

• Real-time insights – Analyze streaming data to monitor and take immediate action. 

• AI and advanced analytics – Apply techniques like machine learning out of the box. 

• granular Security – Fine-grained access controls and encryption safeguard data. 

• Regulatory compliance – Adhere to regulations like HIPAA with built-in auditing. 

• Flexible pricing – Pay only for the resources used with transparent pricing. 

With Fabric, healthcare organizations can break down data siloes, apply cutting-edge analytics, and extract value from their data efficiently and securely, all from a unified platform. 

Core Capabilities of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare

Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare brings together best-in-class Azure services into an integrated environment for data and analytics. Let’s look at some of its key capabilities: 

• Data integration – Seamlessly ingest data from diverse sources, both on-premises and cloud-based. 

• Data warehousing – Implement high-performance warehousing for advanced analytics and insights. 

• Big data processing – Distributed processing of huge datasets using Azure Synapse Analytics. 

• Data lakes – Scalable, secure data lakes for Structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. 

• Real-time analytics – Analyze and act on streaming and IoT data as it arrives. 

• Business intelligence – Visually explore data and share insights using Power BI. 

• Artificial intelligence – Apply techniques like machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. 

• Security and compliance – Safeguard data via encryption, access controls, role-based access, and auditing. 

This integrated set of capabilities enables healthcare organizations to go from data to insights faster, with lower complexity. Multiple Azure services work together seamlessly so you spend less time and effort on data wrangling, which is one of the Benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare. 

HIPAA Compliance in Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare

For organizations handling protected health information (PHI), HIPAA compliance is mandatory. Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare simplifies compliance by implementing rigorous security and privacy controls aligned to HIPAA and other healthcare regulations out of the box. 

Specific compliance capabilities include: 

• Encryption of data at rest and in transit using AES 256-bit encryption and TLS 1.2. 

• Granular role-based access control (RBAC) to restrict data access. 

• Independent auditing and logging of access and changes to PHI. 

• Data de-identification tools to anonymize sensitive fields like patient names. 

• Infrastructure vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. 

• Backups and disaster recovery provisions to ensure availability. 

• Formal agreements detailing protections and liability. 

With these controls, healthcare organizations can avoid the complexity of building compliant data infrastructure themselves, which is one of the Benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare. Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare is audited regularly to ensure ongoing alignment with the latest privacy and healthcare data regulations. 

Enhancing Clinical Trials with Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare

Clinical trials are lengthy and expensive undertakings. It typically takes over 6 years for a drug to go from entering clinical trials to approval. Trial costs can surpass $100 million. 

By enhancing how trial data is managed and analyzed, Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare can accelerate trials and lower costs: 

• High-performance analytics – Query huge datasets from multi-center trials in seconds vs. hours. 

• Real-time insights – Monitor trial progress and spot trends as data is generated. Quickly adjust trial parameters. 

• Operational efficiency – Automate manual reporting and analysis tasks using AI. 

• Patient matching – Identify eligible candidates faster using analytics and datasets like FHIR. 

• Data quality – Clean, validate, and standardize trial data in real-time during ingest. 

• Collaboration – Enable researchers to simultaneously access and analyze trial data. 

Overall, Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare can help compress trial timelines, reduce operational costs, and speed up analysis cycles to improve trial outcomes, which is one of the Benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare. 

Transforming Patient Care with Better Insights

Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare holds great promise to enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient care through data-driven insights. Possible use cases include: 

• Patient profiling – Create 360-degree profiles by combining clinical data with demographic, genomic, and social determinants data. 

• Precision medicine – Match patients to tailored therapies based on integrated health history analytics. 

• Predictive care – Forecast clinical risks in chronic disease patients using AI and multi-parameter analytics. 

• Clinical decision support – Surface relevant medical guidelines and scientific literature at point of care through analytics. 

• Population health – Gain insights from public health, environmental, and socioeconomic datasets to improve community health. 

By aggregating more data sources into a unified view, care providers can deliver personalized, proactive, and evidence-based care optimized to each patient’s needs. This is the future of data-driven medicine, enabled by Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare. The benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare are clear: better patient outcomes, improved care delivery, and enhanced research capabilities. 

Revolutionizing Healthcare Operations

Beyond care delivery and research, Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare also enables healthcare organizations to enhance business operations through better utilization of data. Use cases include: 

• Predictive asset maintenance – Analyze IoT data from medical equipment to predict failures before they occur. 

• Supply chain optimization – Leverage logistics data to predict demand, prevent shortages, and reduce costs. 

• Workflow automation – Standardize and automate workflows like billing and claims processing to boost efficiency. 

• Patient self-service – Create portals with self-service access to medical records, appointments, and physician communication. 

• Sentiment analysis – Monitor and analyze patient feedback and online reviews to improve services. 

• Healthcare fraud detection – Detect fraudulent claims and transactions using AI and anomaly detection. 

The breadth of potential operational enhancements highlights the pervasive impact data and analytics can have across healthcare organizations, made possible by Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare. The benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare extend beyond care delivery to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. 

Unlocking Innovation with Healthcare Data Platforms

As the examples above demonstrate, Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare provides a foundation on which healthcare and life sciences organizations can build data-driven innovations and remake processes. By bringing Azure’s analytics capabilities together into a unified, scalable, and secure platform, Fabric makes it faster to gain insights from data. This in turn accelerates research, enhances efficiency, and improves patient outcomes across the healthcare value chain. The benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare are evident in the ability to drive innovation and improve care delivery. 

Organizations like UPMC have already adopted Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare to transform healthcare: 

Use Case: UPMC 

UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) is one of the leading academic medical centers in the US. To accelerate precision medicine, UPMC deployed Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare to create a multi-modal data platform bringing together clinical, imaging, pathology, molecular, and outcomes data on a single platform. 

Researchers at UPMC can now carry out integrated analysis encompassing multiple data types rapidly. This leads to faster discovery of new correlations, biomarkers, and pathways to inform diagnosis and treatment. Disease progression modeling is also accelerated using Fabric’s analytics capabilities. 

Overall, Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare enables UPMC to deliver on its vision of maximizing health data’s impact. Working together with Microsoft, UPMC continues to identify new ways to apply Fabric’s capabilities to drive cutting-edge research. The benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare are clear in UPMC’s success story. 

By adopting solutions like Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare, leading healthcare organizations are setting the pace for data-driven digital transformation in the industry. You can know more use cases here. 

How Beyond Intranet Can Help Your Healthcare Facility

We know the healthcare industry produces staggering amounts of data each day – everything from electronic health records (EHRs) to medical imaging data and genomic sequences. We also know that Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare can help make the most of this data. But without a guide, that can seem a bit tricky. Maybe, you will leverage one aspect, but miss out on another. This is where Beyond Intranet can help. 

As Microsoft’s solution partner, we provide exclusive access to Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare, a unified analytics platform tailor-made for healthcare. 

Our Microsoft specialists have 17+ years implementing data solutions for enterprise clients. We deliver workshops to transfer Fabric knowledge across your teams. Plus, we customize implementation for your unique needs and provide full lifecycle support. 

Key benefits our Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare consulting provides healthcare organizations:

1. Consolidate siloed systems into unified architecture 
2. Accelerate transition to scalable data infrastructure 
3. Mitigate risks with experienced guidance 
4. Transfer knowledge via hands-on workshops 
5. Get custom strategy aligned to your goals 
6. Simplify your analytics ecosystem 

Let our Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare experts help you finally harness your healthcare data and turn it into strategic insights. Contact Beyond Intranet today to schedule a free consultation.