Data management solutions and big data company Informatica LLC has announced the debut of the industry’s first intelligent data lake, a repository for raw data, that’s made specifically for healthcare.

The healthcare industry sees a great deal of data from numerous sources, most of it unstructured and difficult to compile, curate and even store. Because of the sensitive nature of data coming in from doctors, hospitals, contractors and now the Internet of Things, healthcare institutions must also secure and manage data according to regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act also known as HIPAA. All of these things continue to increase complexity and accountability of data generated by this industry.

Built on the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, the Intelligent Healthcare Data Lake is designed to take into account all of these problems and provide a ready solution for regulatory management, security, data governance and Big Data analytics support.

“In the face of healthcare’s insatiable appetite for data, traditional data warehousing is not enough in the race to business and clinical insights,” said Richard Cramer, chief healthcare strategist at Informatica. “Healthcare organizations now need rapid and agile big data access, high-value discovery analytics, and cost-effective scalability afforded by well managed and governed data lakes.”

The healthcare industry data lake is designed to allow for the aggregation of data from hundreds of hospitals and manage it in a trusted way.

With the new data lake technology, highly distributed data could be accessed through a centralized dashboard. This could lead to insights to previously difficult to access data from Electronic Medical Record systems. With big data application support, healthcare industry professionals would also gain insights faster than with more traditional information technology means, especially over legacy systems with less interconnectivity.

Institutions currently implementing Internet of Things solutions would particularly benefit from a data lake strategy with real-time streaming analytics support. According to the company, the intelligent healthcare data lake can ingest and analyze information from wearable patient IoT device sensors and other medical machine data.

Informatica sees the data lake as a solution for data supply chains, for life sciences research and clinical analysis, as well as a way to help prevent fraud and clerical mistakes by providing secure storage and analysis of claims and records. Large healthcare service providers could use the data lake to optimize patient processing, pharmacy fulfillment, patient claims, payer reimbursement, physician prescriptions and sales compensation.

The technology, available now, will be showcased at the upcoming information technology and healthcare conference HIMSS 2017, in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 19-23.

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