Azure Data Lakes and Healthcare

The healthcare industry in the current times is one of the leading data producers. Global emergency scenarios like the recent pandemic continue to cause seismic shifts worldwide. For healthcare providers, it is important to realize the potential of adopting data analytics tools. Though to reinforce the foundation of data analytics across the care continuum, it is vital that you have the correct data at the right time in an accurate format.

Healthcare organizations are embracing a single data platform rather than multiple platforms. It would ensure easy access and on-demand analysis of health data. Therefore, the concept of the data lake attracts healthcare facilities as it offers real-time, in-depth analysis of diversified data sets. Data Lake storages are highly scalable and secure, thus providing high-performance analytics. It is designed for organizations that want to and need to take advantage of huge volumes of data. Data lakes store raw data, while Data warehouses store data in an organized way. Research indicates that 39% of respondents use cloud-based data lakes for analytics deployment.

While there are various data lake tools and frameworks, Microsoft Azure Data Lake is proving to be beneficial for the healthcare industry. Being one of the leading platforms for data lakes, it includes all the capabilities required to consolidate, catalog & centralize your medical big data.

Azure Data Lake comprises large centralized storage. It can be compared to a physical lake with different tributaries joining it. This includes cloud services with more than 200 products. It provides storage for unstructured (like text, images, social media files, clickstreams etc), semi-structured or structured data (data in rows and columns of database) with unlimited storage capability, thus making it very useful to store data of any size. It offers a free account, which can be used to access all services related to Azure. It also provides unlimited storage, analytics services and cluster capabilities, and is fault-tolerant and designed for parallel processing.

Data Lake storages are highly scalable and secure, thus providing high-performance analytics. It is designed for organizations that want to and need to take advantage of huge volumes of data. Data lakes store raw data, while Data warehouses store data in an organized way. Research indicates that 39% of respondents use cloud based data lakes for analytics deployment.

The quantum of unstructured and structured data generated by the healthcare industry is huge. Data collection in today’s world is no longer a tedious, difficult task. It is now a necessity to have a single platform system for data collection, preservation, and access for the compilation of data. Health professionals have now become increasingly aware of the need for such systems. Azure data consulting can be of help in this.

The benefits of Data Lake platforms in the healthcare industry are many. Routine healthcare data is generally fragmented, collected from different sources and in different formats. Azure Data Lake allows easy and adequate management of data, enabling share, search and analysis of data. It allows access to raw data without any need for predefined structures or the use of any third-party program to decode the data. Those vast volumes of data collection, storage and maintenance are easy in this system helps, especially in the healthcare industry where security, easy access and analytics play a very important role. It provides a viable and affordable system for data collection. It can help consolidate data across other cloud platforms in one central place in a secure environment. It also offers a flexible payment method. It offers a pay-as-you-go model, which eliminates the need for long-term contracts.

A healthcare organization moving to a cloud platform like Azure Data Lake can help its culture by giving it a data-driven approach to problem-solving. It helps deliver practical solutions and can pool data information from several different locations or organizations into one unified pool. The analysis can help create algorithms for more accurate diagnosis and medication.

Challenges faced by Data Lakes

Data entities, which are essential to the Microsoft ecosystem and help enable analytics, require sound coding expertise and knowledge along with a development skillset. Due to this the speed at which analytics can grow or can be used remains restricted or low despite the need and the move to data lakes. Consumers still face initial teething problems with analytics in data lakes. Despite the reduction in cost for data storage, the overall cost for cleaning, governance and data transformation is high as additional tools are needed to complete end-to-end data analytics. A few tools like Azure Data Pipelines, Purview and Synapse become essential and need to be a part of the technology stack and add to the complexity. Data is outpacing and growing faster than computer power. This means as data lakes grow bigger, the computers required to hold or host that data are not getting faster at the same rate. So without efficient data management, clients and businesses will pay more for computer resources needed to handle the data. Time against value is another challenge, where analytics and workflows will take a substantial amount of time to deliver value. Azure data consulting can help to compare cost versus value.

Azure Data Lake is used in the healthcare industry in many ways. As organizations invest in technology, healthcare becomes more personalized and data can be used to monitor and give more viable outcomes. It gives a complete view of every patient, lowering operating costs and giving better data organization. It helps create an agile healthcare organization, which helps in giving quicker responses to patients and is used to give personalized services. It can help provide predictive and prescriptive analytics and thus allows healthcare services to anticipate health outcomes and behaviors. It creates better customer interactions. It can help in Genomic data analytics and help insurance providers manage huge amounts of genetic data.

Azure development consulting offers consulting services in healthcare-related cloud platforms for data accumulation, management and analysis, designing and delivering cloud-based solutions, efficiently and cost-effectively. The Consultation can help achieve higher productivity while implementing and adopting the Azure Data Lake usage. The consultation can help with the migration of applications, data, and or infrastructure.