How Ubiquitous Data Delivers Intelligence Across Your Healthcare Ecosystem

The healthcare industry has been experiencing near-continuous change over the past several years as it relates both to digital transformation and best practices for delivering care. It’s estimated that the pandemic accelerated the shift to digital for healthcare organizations by years, and at the same time new expectations for personalized, value-based care have become the norm.

Data is a key resource for delivering on these demands, and it’s required enterprises to think strategically about incorporating data into the very fabric of their operations. In other words: Healthcare organizations need ubiquitous data.

Ubiquitous data—or continuous, real-time access to healthcare data across the ecosystem—is required both to meet operational performance benchmarks and to deliver the type of quality care that’s now a standard expectation in the healthcare industry.

Gartner emphasizes that this is even a moral obligation as it “enables better patient experiences, better health outcomes, and is a gateway to alleviating human suffering,” researchers wrote in a recent report1.

Still, achieving ubiquitous data access and sharing is a challenge, and “remains constrained over ethical and legal concerns that the industry has yet to fully resolve via confidence that technologies, policies, and governance protect and control for the risk.”

The conundrum for healthcare organizations is that they can’t wait for the issue to be fully ironed out before implementing a ubiquitous data strategy—they must navigate existing complexities and mitigate risks effectively in an area that’s still in its early stages and is rapidly evolving.

This guide will explore ubiquitous data as a concept and a strategy healthcare leaders must implement, its key components and benefits, challenges to implementation, and solutions that can resolve them.

Quick Takeaways:

• Ubiquitous data enables real-time, seamless access to comprehensive healthcare information, crucial for meeting modern care standards.
• Achieving ubiquitous data requires integrating all data types, including patient records, clinical data, and social determinants of health.
• Ubiquitous data drives business intelligence across healthcare ecosystems, creating holistic data views and fueling contextual, meaningful insights.
• Healthcare organizations face challenges in managing data at scale, requiring advanced health data management platforms.
• Coperor Health Data Management Platform (HDMP) provides a comprehensive solution for achieving ubiquitous data and ensuring interoperability across healthcare ecosystems.
  
  

Understanding Ubiquitous Data

Ubiquitous data occurs when data seamlessly flows across all parts of a healthcare ecosystem—provider practices, hospitals, clinics, payers, and patients (among others). This level of real-time integration ensures information is always readily available when it’s needed to make decisions about clinical care as well as the operational strategies that facilitate it.

It encompasses the entire range of data types that exist in healthcare systems, including:

• Patient Records: EHRs that include comprehensive patient medical histories
• Clinical Data: Clinical trials, research studies, and laboratory results
• Financial and Operational Data: Billing information, insurance claims, payment records, logistical and administrative data, staffing, etc.
• Imaging Data: Radiology images, scans, and diagnostic imaging reports
• Pharmaceutical Data: Medication prescriptions, pharmacy records, and drug efficacy data
• Wearable and IoT Data: Health metrics from wearable devices and IoT sensors
• Social Determinants of Health: Data on socioeconomic factors, such as housing, employment, and education, that impact patient health
• Genomic Data: Genetic information that can inform personalized medicine and treatment
• Patient-Generated Health Data: Data from patient self-reports, home monitoring, and personal health applications

A key aspect of ubiquitous data is its complete standardization and integration of all the data mentioned above—it eliminates data fragmentation and leverages modern tools like MDM solutions and AI-powered analytics to drive integrated, contextual, and intelligent insights.

Ubiquitous data is also foundational to achieving interoperability of data systems—or seamless exchange of information across various platforms and technologies within a healthcare ecosystem—which has shifted from a nice-to-have and competitive differentiator to a regulatory requirement under standards like FHIR and the CMS Prior Authorization Final Rule.

How Ubiquitous Data Creates Intelligent Healthcare Ecosystems

In practice, ubiquitous data delivers a number of impactful benefits that collectively create intelligent healthcare organizations—ones that can operate effectively in today’s decentralized healthcare landscape and meet the increasingly complex demands of patients, partners, and regulatory bodies.

Gartner’s research on ubiquitous data as a key driver of intelligence sorts its impact into two important categories: achieving the industry’s holistic long-term vision of ubiquitous data (key to meeting the moral obligation for data-powered value-based care) and fueling insights in intelligent health (essential for making data digestible and usable by internal stakeholders).

As Gartner aptly puts it: “Ubiquitous data should be as simple as turning on the faucet and knowing that water—safe for human consumption through the development and applications of standards and technologies—will flow.”

When ubiquitous data is achieved, stakeholders across healthcare ecosystems can access the data they need with full confidence it’s up-to-date, complete, accurate, and secure. It also gives data meaningful context, leading to the next key area of impact: fueing intelligent and actionable insights.

When data is democratized across healthcare ecosystems and available in meaningful forms (i.e. insights from analyzed raw data), it can be systematically applied to real-world use cases: expedited R&D, secure patient access to personal data, payer/provider collaboration, data-driven decision making, performance reporting and more.

In other words: Data shifts from an available resource to one that’s fundamentally threaded into internal processes, decisions, and care delivery.

Challenges to Implementation (and How to Solve Them)

For most healthcare IT leaders, the question isn’t about whether or not they need ubiquitous data but how to make the transformation and manage it long-term. It’s impossible to do with traditional, manual processes—data is being generated (and thus must be managed) at a speed and scale humans can’t practically execute.

Further, they need support in navigating complexities around data security and privacy, analytics, and regulatory compliance—all areas that are continuously evolving and changing.

The solution is a comprehensive Healthcare Data Management Platform (HDMP) that puts data and insights in one place, creating a single source of truth where high quality data can be accessed, shared, and analyzed to inform decisions and care delivery.

HDMPs leverage the latest capabilities around automation, analytics, and system interoperability to ensure organizations can remain agile, scale as needed, and reliably access data ubiquitously across their entire ecosystems (and from anywhere).

Gaine’s Coperor HDMP is a comprehensive data management and integration platform with Master Data Management at its core. It leverages the largest data model in the industry connecting Provider, Patient, Member, Member, Claims, Clinical, and several other domains of data all mastered and inter-connected within a single cross-domain, longitudinal platform. Coperor is compliant with − but extends beyond − interoperability standards like HL7 FHIR, providing necessary context for data fabric, data warehouse, analytics, or AI initiatives, allowing every data source to actively contribute, maintain, and then ultimately consume cleansed, accurate trustworthy data with ease.

Learn more about how Coperor can help you transform your data strategy.

1Gartner, Inc. “Ubiquitous Data: Transforming Healthcare and Life Science With Continuous Intelligence and Insight,” 6 March 2024, by Laura Craft, Jeff Cribbs, Jeff Smith, Amanda Dall’Occhio