Unifying nonprofit healthcare data using Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud

This is a guest post by Chris Cooper, senior area vice president of Collibra.

Nonprofit organizations tend to have a lot of data that resides in systems that don’t interact with each other. This problem is often a legacy issue—nonprofits typically have the resources to invest in the applications that they need for a given task at any point in time. They then add more applications to satisfy new business requirements. As time goes on, organizations end up with a variety of purpose-specific applications that don’t always interoperate with others.

For organizations in the nonprofit healthcare industry, this problem is made more difficult to manage by the sheer volume of data that they collect. For example, research organizations must organize trial data that can span years, while healthcare providers collect patient records and health outcome data that can span the lifetime of a patient.

Solving this data unification problem is the reason that Collibra, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, built the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud is a software as a service application that runs on AWS. In this post, learn the benefits that your organization can attain by deploying the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud on AWS and discover how one nonprofit healthcare customer uses Collibra to drive better outcomes.

About the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud

The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud is a suite of tools that organizations of all sizes can use to find and understand data from multiple sources. Collibra administrators within your organization can use its data profiling tools to classify and organize the data from these sources into communities, based on the personas that the data is most relevant to. They can also engage subject matter experts across the organization to help explain and define the data once it’s been organized. Collibra offers dozens of built-in connectors, which you can use to automate the ingestion process. You can use these connectors to integrate Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud with leading data stores, business intelligence (BI) platforms, legacy on premise data stores, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

Once the data is available and understood, your users can begin to turn that data into insights. Built-in lineage, data quality and governance capabilities help your data consumers trust data is fit for purpose, while making sure that their usage adheres to privacy best practices and internal security policies.

Deploying Collibra on AWS provides several benefits. First, it means that you don’t need to purchase and maintain your own hardware to run the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. Instead, AWS manages the hardware. Second, hosting on AWS means that you can deploy the application in several AWS Regions around the globe. By creating geographical redundancy, you can maximize the availability of your data.

Plus, you can purchase the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud through the AWS Marketplace. When you do, the application is automatically installed to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), so you can use high-performance servers hosted in the AWS Cloud quickly and without adding to your IT and data team’s to-do list. You get all the benefits of hosting on AWS, and your charges for using the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud appear on your monthly AWS bill. The AWS Marketplace helps you simplify the process of procuring, paying for, and managing licenses for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud.

How Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin solves the data unification problem

Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin (F&MCW) is a nonprofit academic medical center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The organization was formed as a partnership between Froedtert Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Like many healthcare organizations, F&MCW collects a lot of data. For F&MCW, this data includes patient information—including electronic medical records, doctor’s notes, lab results, and prescriptions—as well as business data, such as accounting spreadsheets and human resources files. Each category of data previously resided in its own dedicated silo, making it difficult to get a full 360-degree view of the patient, and limiting collaboration between departments.

By adopting the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud on AWS, F&MCW has been able to unify access to these diverse datasets. Once the datasets were automatically catalogued and classified, F&MCW created a landing page that medical professionals can use to understand and access the full set of patient clinical data. By using a single source to find data across the two organizations, care providers can make medical decisions based on the patient’s complete history, resulting in better patient outcomes.

With the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud, F&MCW’s team has a single source of truth that connects all parts of their data strategy. As a result, they can make better, faster decisions.

Conclusion

The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud can help nonprofit organizations knock down data silos. By bringing together data from disparate sources, nonprofits can unlock insights and identify relationships that previously weren’t available to them. Organizations can use these insights to increase their agility and improve business outcomes.

You can learn more about the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud by visiting the data unification solutions category in the AWS Solutions Library for Nonprofits and the nonprofit solutions category of the AWS Marketplace.

Read more about AWS for nonprofits:

• How nonprofits reimagine work using smart technology
• Three questions about cloud procurement for the public sector explained
• How Share Our Strength addresses childhood hunger with unified data analysis on AWS
• Jacaranda Health advances maternal and infant health across Kenya and beyond with AWS
• Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation uses AWS to advance cutting-edge pediatric cancer research worldwide

Subscribe to the AWS Public Sector Blog newsletter to get the latest in AWS tools, solutions, and innovations from the public sector delivered to your inbox, or contact us.

Please take a few minutes to share insights regarding your experience with the AWS Public Sector Blog in this survey, and we’ll use feedback from the survey to create more content aligned with the preferences of our readers.