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Recap: Data Lakehouse Blog Series

Lakehouse Blog

Perficient and AWS recently partnered with HIMSS to host a webinar that went in-depth about Perficient’s Healthy Lakehouse solution, specifically:

  • Driving insights across the enterprise through the pragmatic, scalable implementation of a data lakehouse
  • Maximizing business value by strategically approaching cloud-based data modernization, not merely as a move from on-premises systems
  • Understanding the value of choosing a cloud partner that is deeply invested in solving healthcare’s unique business and consumer needs

The webinar had a panel of experts from Perficient and AWS that included:

Tom Lennon: Practice Director, Healthcare Data & Analytics, Perficient

Priyal Patel: Director, Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Perficient

Rahul Ghate: Head of Worldwide Partner Development for Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Analytics, AWS

You can download the full webinar recording, here.

Blog Series Recap

We have put together a blog series building off the webinar and going more in-depth about Perficient’s Healthy Lakehouse solution. You can find the full blog series, here.

Here is a high-level overview of the blog series:

Blog 1 Summary: Driving ROI in Healthcare with Data and Analytics Modernization

Most healthcare organizations we work with have taken some steps towards modernizing their data and analytics capabilities. However, they’ve not been able to truly take advantage of the full set of benefits and innovation that this modernization vision offers. We’ve seen some movement to the cloud, mainly lifting and shifting data. However, much of this, really, just replicates many of the same legacy challenges that existed in the on-prem world and don’t take full advantage of the momentum that could be leveraged from these initiatives and investment.

Data Modernization-Healthcare organizations need to take steps to increase data security. Historically, healthcare leaders have been understandably hesitant to give up control of patient and member data. Still, the reality is the investment and skill of AWS’ cloud-data security team is multiple orders of magnitude greater than that of any single healthcare organization. So, we should view cloud migration as one step in helping us grow our data security capabilities.

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They also need to develop the capabilities to provision and instantiate new environments quickly and reliably – this is a huge benefit for data & analytics project teams, and reduces the effort, timeline, and cost to deploy environments compared to traditional manual deployments. And this eases the burden of spinning-up sandboxes for discovery-based analysis.

Analytics Modernization-Driving analytics value and insight to business users and stakeholders should be the focus for teams. To accomplish this, we need to enable seamless access to the right information. This includes BI scorecards and visualizations of course, but also self-directed analysis that is or should be, table-stakes for any modern analytics program. This means enabling teams to create accessible discovery sandboxes quickly and easily for ad-hoc exploration by power users and data scientists without sacrificing the necessary governance and security.

When we get this right, we can advance beyond simply providing insight to better understand healthcare and achieve the capabilities to automate functions that reduce the load on our completely overburdened HC workers, which, as we know, is a formidable threat to continued success in delivering healthcare to our population.

Blog 2 Summary: Perficient Healthy Lakehouse Accelerates Time and Cost to Value

Through past implementations, Perficient has learned a lot about what adds time, effort, and cost to healthcare data & analytics projects.  We’ve also learned a bit about what can be done to reduce the lift involved.

We’ve pulled together a set of architectural design patterns, and frameworks, which can help reduce the time and cost it takes to get to value when building a healthcare data lake, data warehouse, and analytics solution. We call this framework the Healthy Lakehouse. The Healthy Lakehouse is based on field-proven AWS services and solution design patterns which Perficient has developed while implementing solutions for clients in the Provider, Payer, PBM, Pharma, and Clinical Research domains.

Creating this type of framework is something any organization can potentially do on its own, but starting from scratch takes time and money, and it’s increasingly hard for most of our clients to keep up with the pace of innovation by themselves.

The business insight which can be derived from the Lakehouse is really a function of the data which is provisioned within, and the analytics developed based on that data. The Business Insights listed on the right side of the chart provide an overview of just some of the key domains of insight PRFT has developed with past clients, although this should not be seen as a finite or limited list of what is possible.

The Healthy Lakehouse framework leverages the AWS Cloud Platform and Amazon Data and Analytics Services including:

    • AWS Glue, Kinesis, S3 Buckets, DynamoDB, Redshift, Athena, Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Amazon Quicksight, and Sagemaker

Blog 3 Summary: Use Cases and Successes for Perficient’s Healthy Lakehouse Solution

We shared real-life examples of projects and solutions we’ve executed with our clients including a home health success story.

One of the country’s largest home healthcare providers asked Perficient to assist them to define, architect, and implement a modern data & analytics solution.  They wanted to become an operationally integrated, data-driven organization and realized they needed help getting there.

The solution was a fully functional cloud-based data lakehouse and analytics solution that provided financial and operational performance analytics across operating units, and included analytics like:

  • A staff-hours & revenue dashboard
  • A Skilled vs Unskilled worker performance scorecard
  • and Billing trend-analysis visualizations

This solution eliminated the need to have 4 highly skilled analysts spend upward of 2 weeks per quarter collecting and correlating this information just to create these executive dashboards.  These analysts can now focus on identifying ways to improve performance as opposed to wrangling data and performing swivel chair integration in excel.

Perficient + AWS

Perficient understands the complexities of the healthcare industry and the unique challenges healthcare organizations face. Our healthcare practice delivers strategic business and technology consulting insights that help our clients transform with today’s digital consumer experience demands. This strategic guidance is then transformed into pragmatic technology solutions that improve clinical, financial, and operational efficiency.

As an AWS partner, we have extensive experience with Big Datadata warehousingbusiness intelligence, and analytics, and work with our clients to transform data into timely and actionable insights using AWS services such as AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Quicksight, and Athena.

Perficient’s healthcare practice is dedicated to helping healthcare organizations leverage data and analytics to improve care quality, access, and delivery, and to better manage the costs associated with providing that care.

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Tom Lennon, Director, Healthcare Data & Analytics, Perficient

Tom is a consulting executive with extensive experience leading and building information technology-based solutions and teams with a focus on data and analytics. He has been working with healthcare providers and plans to accomplish this for the past 10-plus years, and is driven to help healthcare organizations better serve the population of patients and members under their care.

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