Why Is 2023 the Year for Data Lineage in Healthcare?

In 2018, 30% of the world’s data volume was generated by the healthcare industry, and RBC Capital predicts that by 2025, the compound annual growth rate of data for healthcare will reach 36%. With each patient generating nearly 80 megabytes of data every year, it’s not surprising that the amount of data has continued to grow. 

Most healthcare data ecosystems are too complex for manual visualization. They are too diverse and interconnected, rife with directly and indirectly connected applications, micro services, and infrastructures, with countless dependencies defining how all these touch points interact with one another. 

This is one of the main indicators of data complexity, and with this level of data complexity, it can be difficult for any one person or team to have complete visibility over it all. It’s not a question of if your team will miss something, but how much they will miss. Without automated lineage, it is nearly impossible to find and untangle all areas of complexity. 

In this blog, we’ll break down five problems healthcare will face in 2023 and explain how lineage can help.

Save your spot for our webinar series: Unlocking Business Intelligence in  Healthcare with Data Lineage

1. Slower Delivery of Predictive Insights

MIT and Hewlett Packard Enterprise reported that data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat revenue goals than non-data-driven companies, and 162% more likely to significantly outperform them. This is the power of predictive insight. But due to the healthcare industry’s overabundance of data, much of it goes to waste. One report found that as much as 68% of data goes unleveraged. 

In healthcare, this data remains inaccessible because:

  1. It is stored in an unusable format or inaccessible location.
  2. It cannot be traced and therefore cannot be trusted.
  3. It’s difficult to determine what data is important.
  4. The data is sensitive and needs to be protected.

When data engineering resources are spent on unproductive impact analysis, such as assessing the impact of new development requirements, it distracts developers and slows down the delivery of new features. Data lineage helps speed up the delivery of predictive insights by generating comprehensive data flow visualizations automatically. 

Engineering teams can now scan the entire environment at the click of a button, saving time and busting the barriers of inaccessible data. 

2. Growing Number of Data Incidents

In 2022, more than 50.4 million patient records were breached. Due to the limited visibility of complex data systems, assessing the end-to-end impact of data dependencies and changes is demanding and sometimes impossible.

Current data observability tools are still primarily reactive—meaning organizations find bugs once there has already been an incident, rather than preventing them. This is concerning because even a single data incident can cause severe damage to your organization. IBM reports a single data breach costs a healthcare organization an average of $4.3 million.

Data lineage grants IT teams high levels of observability without large amounts of manual intervention. This allows teams to be truly proactive—to catch incidents before they happen. 

3. Decreased Trust in Reports & Insights

Even in 2023, the healthcare industry is still struggling with data governance. Unintuitive Electronic Health Record (EHR) interfaces and reliance on paper records can make data entry an impossible task for already overwhelmed clinicians. It’s already been said that healthcare is the leader in data quantity, but the quality of that data remains to be seen. 

If you can’t fully explain how data was collected or verify its origins, you’re going to experience severe business impacts and frustration—you can’t get basic questions answered or leverage data for better patient outcomes. 

Data lineage is a powerful tool in the fight for building trust in data. Detailed lineage creates an added semantic layer for more accurate and timely reports that lay the foundation for more informed decisions and better forecasting without second-guessing.

Automated lineage also puts an end to the costly, lengthy, manual processes of lineage collection and updating. MANTA customers have saved between $5 and 15M in the initial phase of implementation alone.

4. Shortage of Data Engineering Talent

Engineering talent is hard to find, especially in the competitive post-COVID-19 environment. The last thing an organization should do is waste their team’s time on manual, routine tasks. This can increase their frustration and likelihood of leaving. 

Due to the growing complexity of the data stack, data engineers have become more critical than any other role, as they oversee data pipelines and integrated data structures. This requires a larger skill set, which makes good data engineers harder to find and even harder to keep.

Healthcare organizations that invest in data lineage remove this burden from their IT team, allowing them to refocus their efforts on tasks that can’t be automated. This can significantly reduce turnover. 

5. Increased Risk of Non-Compliance

The healthcare industry doesn’t just have a lot of data, it has a lot of regulated data. In 2022, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) settled more than 126 cases of HIPAA violations totaling more than $133 million.

Although many people think of hospitals when they hear of HIPAA violations, the reality is that almost all areas of healthcare have seen increased offenses. In 2021, the top five entities that committed HIPAA violations were, in order of frequency:

  1. General Hospitals
  2. Private Practices
  3. Pharmacies
  4. Outpatient Facilities
  5. Community Health Centers

Without data lineage, healthcare organizations are at risk of falling out of compliance. Data lineage provides a complete overview of all regulated data being processed by an organization to meet regulatory requirements and avoid hefty penalties.

Why MANTA for Healthcare

As a healthcare organization, you process high volumes and types of data. Your IT environment will only increase in complexity, and your IT team is struggling to keep up. You need to get your data systems under control and find a way to stay efficient despite this skyrocketing complexity. You need data lineage in healthcare.

MANTA has helped more than 15 healthcare organizations achieve accurate reporting, improve data governance, increase trust in data and reinforce their overall data management strategy. Find out how our lineage solution can help you in 2023. Schedule a demo with an engineer today.

Webinar Unlocking Business Intelligence In Healthcare with Data Lineage

Related Resources