Big Data 101:

A Guide for Healthcare Leaders

Table of contents

01 02
Healthcare and the data Organise for insights:
opportunity Data management and analytics

03 04
Connect your data:: Protect health information:
Interoperability Security, privacy and compliance

05 06
Transform sustainably: Bring it all together:
Change management Make a plan for your organisation
01
Healthcare and
the data opportunity
Gain insights to improve care
The advancement of technology offers providers, payors and pharmaceutical and life
sciences organisations the tools to improve care and health outcomes through digital
transformation. At the heart of this transformation is the data opportunity.

The data opportunity means taking the data your organisation is already
generating and making it work harder and smarter. By organising, analysing,
connecting and securing their data, healthcare organisations can:

• Enable personalised care by creating improve care efficacy and operational

an experience that gives patients and effectiveness.
members control over their secure
health data and provide insights that • Protect health information by ensuring
facilitate self-care and family support. privacy and effective security end
to end, managing compliance and
• Empower care teams by making it faster evolving regulatory changes and
and easier to share secure health data, improving data governance and
collaborate and generate insights that trust ona continuous basis.
improve patient outcomes today –
and team performance for tomorrow. • Reimagine healthcare by building new
insights and advancing value-based care
• Improve operational outcomes by to shape the future of population health.
harnessing clinical and operational
data to accelerate diagnoses and

4 Healthcare and the data opportunity

Break down silos
Data grows exponentially, and healthcare data is uniquely complex. Healthcare
organisations are dealing with both structured data, like electronic health records,
and unstructured data, like wearable devices, medical imaging, video and audio
files. These data sources are often siloed from one another.

This sprawling ecosystem of fragmented data sources can make it difficult for
healthcare leaders to know where to start when trying to achieve the promise
of digital transformation. We’re here to help.

5 Healthcare and the data opportunity

Start your transformation journey today
This guide provides a blueprint of topics to focus on as you build your strategy to
take advantage of the data opportunity. There are four key areas to consider:

Data management Interoperability

and analytics

Security, privacy Change management

and compliance

At the end of the guide, you will also be

able to access resources such as beginner
courses on understanding AI for healthcare
and a downloadable Digital Transformation Don’t want to wait?
Discussion Guide that provides visuals
and key questions you can use to audit
and discuss your approach to data
Jump to the resources section

management with your technical staff.

Let’s get started.

6 Healthcare and the data opportunity

02
Organise for insights:
Data management and analytics
Bring your data together
Today, healthcare organisations’ data – including
operational databases, patient healthcare records,
business intelligence, ERP systems and medical device
data – is stored in multiple locations, both virtually
and geographically. This can create a digital whirlwind
of information from an ever-increasing number of
sources. Driving healthcare transformation requires
a modernised data platform that breaks down those
silos in order to unleash data’s full potential.

Consider the idea of building a data estate. A data

estate is a cumulative term we often use for all the data
under an organisation’s control and the connective
threads that link disparate data systems together. It
allows organisations to unlock the full potential of data
from genesis to analytics-driven insight and ultimately
to actionable business intelligence. A data estate
ingests, stores, prepares, models, serves and visualises
data to produce insights that can support, boost and
even transform operations.

8 Organise for insights: Data management and analytics

Create unity
In general, healthcare organisations or action without purpose. Applying
maintain two types of systems for their advanced analytics and machine learning
data: data warehouses and data lakes. to this disparate array of information can
be  challenging.
Data lakes house various types of
unstructured data in their original To address these issues, focus on uniting
formats and can uncover important data from across your entire organisation,
signals about patients, services, making it discoverable, trustworthy,
employees and processes. understandable and trackable. Creating
and  implementing the data estate
Data warehouses provide a hierarchical methodology for your organisation
system to manage structured data and allows you to optimise data for advanced
provide critical overall insights on business analytics, machine learning and AI insights
health. Both are important, yet they usually to dramatically transform your business
operate independently of one another, and speed up innovation.
which can lead to uninformed decisions

9 Organise for insights: Data management and analytics

Enable collaboration, drive efficiency and
provide more personalised care
With a well-managed data estate providing your fingertips can be key to bringing
a single view of accurate information, down costs through reduced readmissions,
healthcare organisations can collaborate addressing chronic conditions and
more efficiently and have more meaningful encouraging overall well-being.
discussions at the individual patient
level. Natural language processing (NLP), Effective data estate management also
analytics, and data-driven insights can provides the opportunity to automate
help unlock value from the vast amounts administrative tasks. Those tasks can
of unstructured data that are pervasive in include routine actions, like scheduling
healthcare. or data entry, and tomorrow’s innovations,
like the consistent integration of patient
Using data and analytics to get a 360° satisfaction data. Digital transformation
view of each patient or member can can free your staff to spend less time
also empower care teams to collaborate on busy work and more time on
not just in illness, but also in wellness. delivering quality care.
Keeping a complete patient portrait at

To learn more about managing your data and using AI and advanced analytics to drive
clinical insights and improve operational outcomes, check out our eBook Breaking Down AI:
10 Real Applications in Healthcare.

Read the eBook



10 Organise for insights: Data management and analytics

03
Connect your data:
Interoperability
Reduce friction
Interoperability is the extent to which According to a study by Dartmouth
different data systems can communicate Atlas, 30% of healthcare spending is
productively with one another. In a world wasted on costly and ineffective care
of perfect interoperability, patients would as patients switch between hospitals,
enjoy the frictionless exchange of their doctors and different health systems.
data, with appropriate permissions and
controls, as they move between provider, Quite often, this is because their patient
payor and pharma. data isn’t following them. Many electronic
health record platforms don’t work
Healthcare organisations often encounter well with other systems, as they lack
this concept in the context of Fast interoperability across platforms and
Healthcare Interoperability Resources, patient information access devices.
or FHIR (pronounced as ‘fire’). FHIR
is a specification, or a set of rules and Enabling true interoperability requires
standards, that defines how clinical providers and managed care organisations
health data can be made interoperable to share information with multiple systems
across systems. It can be used by – all with different owners, different
cloud computing companies, device processes and different underlying
manufacturers and other technology methods  of assembling data. This data
organisations to help build a fully needs to be normalised to support
interoperable healthcare ecosystem. population health management goals
and delivered to the right people at the
The real challenge of interoperability right time in the right setting so they can
is not just creating a free flow of data take the right actions. Any friction that
between systems, but also figuring out prevents information sharing among
how to move information in a meaningful these disparate systems and settings
way so that it is useful in a different context, means that critical data doesn’t get
as well as merging workflows so that to the people who need it in time to
people can do their jobs more efficiently. make decisions that will affect care.
Move towards a connected future
As the consumerisation of healthcare Your organisation can meet these
increases, people expect their expectations by ensuring that
experiences to be personalised and access patients, members and staff all
to their healthcare information to be easy have the right information at the
and without barriers. Whether they’re right time. Interoperability is the key.
interacting with a clinician, a pharmacy
or an insurance company, patients
are becoming more actively engaged
in making their healthcare decisions,
and their health spending habits are
becoming more important.

To find out more about how Microsoft is supporting healthcare interoperability,

take a look at Azure API for FHIR and test it yourself.

Try Azure API for FHIR 

04
Protect health
information:
Security, privacy and compliance
Focus on trust
Security, privacy and compliance Microsoft is in constant conversation
are foundational to any healthcare with healthcare organisations about
organisation’s approach to the opportunities and challenges
adopting cloud computing and data they’re facing as they move applications
management. The secure and compliant containing protected health information
storage, use and movement of sensitive (PHI) to the cloud and expand how
health data is the cornerstone of trust and where clinicians and patients
in healthcare and protecting privacy. access confidential information.
Good data governance supports good
stewardship and compliance, which Data misuse, accidental or otherwise,
in turn helps reduce fraud, waste and undermines patient trust in the entities
abuse; earns the trust of patients and that are stewards of their PHI.
healthcare professionals; and improves
the quality of care. Earning the trust of your patients and
members means going above and
As healthcare organisations collect an beyond the basic requirements of laws and
ever-increasing volume of sensitive regulations. This responsibility sometimes
personal data through an expanding array means that we must think harder about
of devices, that data must be secure and how to help organisations harness the
managed by stewards following clear power of AI and other technologies;
rules. Securing the most sensitive data Microsoft’s view is that it is better to start
from patients and members protects from patient privacy and work toward AI-
data from improper use and underpins powered solutions.
all possible advancements that can
improve healthcare outcomes.

15 Protect health information: Security, privacy and compliance

Protect proactively with the right tools
Because a breach of patient or member data is a breach of trust, care teams need tools
that can help them proactively secure patient information and respond to audits or patient
data requests. With the right approach and tools, you can protect sensitive health data
to ensure privacy and effective security end to end, manage compliance and evolving
regulatory changes and improve data governance and trust on a continuous basis.

As you build your data management strategy, seek tools that can:

• Support control over who has Good tools will support the General
access to sensitive and regulated Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
health information. Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) and HITRUST.
• Help care teams assess and manage
health compliance from a single • Enable patient monitoring data to be
dashboard and get a deeper securely organised, normalised and
understanding through actionable added to electronic medical records
insights. and electronic health records using FHIR-
standard interfaces.
• Help support compliance with regulatory
frameworks through built-in data
governance and privacy capabilities.

Learn more now

Security and compliance are such weighty and complex topics that one guide can only
scratch the surface. Here are a few additional resources to support your strategy:

A Holistic Approach to Data Security, Privacy and Compliance for Healthcare 

Five Tactics for Improving Security and Compliance in Healthcare 
Microsoft Cloud Trust Centre for Healthcare 
05
Transform sustainably:
Change management
Shift the culture
As you build your strategy to harness With so many new ways to collaborate,
the power of data for better healthcare change management is necessary
outcomes, it is important to also make to ensure that tools like mobile devices,
a plan for change management. video chat and real-time transcription
Change management is about evolving are used consistently. Only then will
organisational culture to unlock the impact patients and members truly be at the
of technology. All the innovation in the centre of their healthcare journeys.
world won’t do any good if people can’t, or
won’t, use it to change the way they work.

18 Transform sustainably: Change management

Identify barriers Change management at your
organisation will prove crucial
and adjust processes for adopting innovations
and fostering a forward-
Barriers to change are often internal, such thinking mindset. Consider
as employee resistance, budget restrictions incorporating new processes
and culture. However, healthcare brings into your workplace, such as
additional challenges, including the size and including innovation in multiyear
complexity of an organisational structure, planning projects and introducing
competing priorities among clinicians communication practices to track
and administrators and strict legal and innovation initiatives.
regulatory restrictions. These concerns
are complex and idiosyncratic, and every To learn more about preparing
organisation will approach them differently. your organisational culture to
Change management is a journey that become innovation-ready, listen
leverages technology to achieve a vision. In to Microsoft’s NextGen Health
other words: Technology is the tool. People Podcast episode on driving
are the focus. And more value is the outcome. culture change when adopting AI.

Listen now 

19 Transform sustainably: Change management

06
Bring it all together:
Make a plan for your organisation
Start the conversation
Creating an effective data management with secure and interoperable data and
strategy is the key to taking advantage tools to unlock insights.
of technology-driven innovations
in healthcare. New technologies The first step towards achieving
like wearables, AI, mixed reality and this goal is taking stock of where
predictive analytics are the next frontier your organisation is in approaching
in healthcare, but their impacts will digital transformation. Want to start
most benefit those organisations with a conversation with your technical staff?
well-managed data estates working

Download our Digital Transformation Discussion Guide for PowerPoint slides you can use
as a jumping-off point to assess the tools you have and the changes you need to enable
personalised care, empower care teams, improve operational outcomes, protect health
information and reimagine healthcare.

Download the discussion guide 

Want to learn more?

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to advanced tools
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Read Ethical AI for Healthcare: Health Podcast to learn how Microsoft
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take advantage of the power of AI
in a responsible way. Listen to the podcast 
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22 Bring it all together: Make a plan for your organisation

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Better care.
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