Is your healthcare organization in need of a stronger data governance framework? In this post, we’ll break down how you can take your data governance to the next level by activating your metadata.
The Importance of Data Governance in Healthcare
The need for strong data governance in the healthcare industry is undeniable. For starters, the healthcare industry generates a lot of data – around 30% of the world’s total data, according to RBC Capital Markets. Additionally, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of healthcare-related data will reach 36% by 2025, which is higher than other enormous industries like manufacturing and financial services.
In other words, the healthcare industry is generating a nearly incomprehensible amount of data at an increasing rate.
In fact, one Forbes article claims that the healthcare industry generates petabytes of data weekly to monthly (for reference, one petabyte is one million gigabytes). Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum estimated that hospitals generated 50 petabytes of data per year in 2019. Given the emergence of a world-altering global pandemic since that estimate, it’s fair to assume that this number is much higher today.
Okay, we’ve made our point: there is a lot of healthcare data, and more being generated every second. But the importance of data governance in the healthcare industry goes deeper than that. Healthcare is among the most regulated industries, with organizations needing to comply with data regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and TEFCA.
On top of that, the way healthcare providers use data has a real-life impact on patient outcomes. For example, think about the harm that could be caused by a doctor making clinical decisions based on inaccurate data within an electronic health record (EHR) system.
With a strong data governance framework, you can keep your healthcare data secure and compliant while using it to make better decisions. To do so effectively, you need to know how to activate your metadata.
Active Metadata Insights are Key to Better Governance
Before digging into how to leverage active metadata, let’s talk about what metadata is.
Metadata more broadly can be defined as data about data. It provides context, or information, about your data. While many organizations collect metadata, it often sits unused in data silos post-collection. If you aren’t doing anything with your metadata besides collecting and storing it, how is it supposed to provide value to your organization?
Active metadata takes metadata a step further. But what makes metadata “active”? Gartner’s Market Guide for Active Metadata Management explains that active metadata is:
- Continuously collected and processed to distill information
- Used to derive intelligence and insights in the form of recommendations, warnings, and notifications
- Delivered to people when and where they need it (rather than those people needing to seek out metadata insights themselves)
See the difference? Unlike metadata collecting metaphorical dust in data silos – often called static or passive metadata – active metadata gives your organization the ability to derive powerful insights that you can use to maximize the value of your data governance framework. With a strong automated data lineage solution, you can activate your metadata to finally unlock its full potential.
Activate Your Metadata with MANTA’s Data Lineage
Activating your metadata requires complete visibility into your entire data environment, including where your data originated, how it flows through your systems, and all of its direct and indirect dependencies with other data elements. After all, it’s impossible to activate metadata that you don’t know you have.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what a data lineage solution can help you do. No matter how complex your data environment is, MANTA reaches its every corner to restore observability, keep your data pipeline, and activate your metadata for better business insights.
With MANTA as your data lineage vendor, you can export your lineage to the supported third-party governance solution you already use (e.g., Informatica, Collibra, Alation, IBM, Ataccama, data.world, and BigID). Whether you need to gain trust in your healthcare-related data, understand how regulated data is flowing to meet regulatory requirements, or simply spend less time figuring out your data environment and more time putting data to good use, automated data lineage from MANTA can help.
Want to learn more about active metadata? Our CEO and founder, Tomas Kratky, recently wrote an in-depth article on how active metadata makes your data lineage insights actionable. Click here to read it now.
