Healthcare’s Cloud Analytics Platform Paradox: High Expectations, Low Data Usability
You’ve made a transformational move. Investing in a powerful cloud platform like Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon HealthLake, or Google Cloud for Healthcare is a critical step toward a future powered by data. Your teams are poised to unlock transformative insights, streamline operations, and fundamentally improve how you manage member health and risk.
But many forward-thinking leaders like you encounter a hidden, frustrating paradox: the incredible potential of the cloud platform now feels stalled. Your analytics teams are struggling to get trustworthy insights, your data engineers and scientists are spending more time trying to ingest, assemble and clean data than building analytical models, and the promises made to the enterprise businesses who funded the project, fall short of expectations. They are left thinking ‘we spend all of this money to move our data to the cloud but I see no difference in my business outcomes’.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This isn’t a failure of your cloud strategy. It’s a sign of a hidden, final-mile challenge that many of the most innovative health systems, payers and payviders are now learning to solve: the data itself isn’t ready for the platform.
The endowment of existing data: Building on what you have
Your organization’s data with decades of clinical records, claims, and financial information is an invaluable asset. It represents your history and holds the key to your future. The challenge is that this data was created for different purposes, in different systems, using different standards. It was never designed to be seamlessly aggregated and analyzed in a modern cloud environment.
Simply lifting and shifting this raw data into a sophisticated platform is like putting unrefined crude oil into a Formula 1 race car. The engine is world-class, but it can’t perform without the right fuel. The result is stalled projects and a frustrating gap between your investment and commitments to your business partners.