Historically, most healthcare data was in hard copy format or stored in the IT department’s relational database. But with the emergence of wearable, mobile, and web technologies, data comes to the IT department from everywhere, and in every possible format. Legacy physical data warehouses and ETL processes are not equipped to combine such heterogeneous data to extract meaningful information out of it in real time. Electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR) integration poses a significant challenge for many healthcare IT departments. Most importantly, while machine generated or other types of patient data are in motion, maintaining the security and privacy of patient data is of the utmost importance. Modern healthcare IT departments are in dire need of a technology that can generate instant insights based on heterogeneous sources of data while providing end-to-end data security and governance.
