Employing nearly 15 million people, the healthcare industry has become one of the most important drivers of the U.S. economy. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it accounts for nearly 10 percent of the total workforce. It is increasingly dominated by large systems—both non- and for-profit—that are leveraging data in all the ways large organizations do. In fact, with the privacy concerns around medical record keeping and storage, the challenges in utilizing data to optimize performance are arguably more complex than they are for other businesses.

Here are several real-world examples of how healthcare organizations are using data- and AI-driven solutions to improve care and health outcomes.

In 2022, the National Institutes of Health published a research report that provides an overview on the state of data analytics in healthcare. The report details how healthcare organizations are using structured and unstructured data from various sources in their treatment protocols.

DeepThink Health anonymizes and curates complex and unstructured health data into actionable insights for healthcare providers. The company worked with AWS to increase the scale and precision with which it could extract and analyze data while preserving security and complying with HIPAA and HITRUST regulations.

PwC and Microsoft partnered with The Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC) to use AI and cloud technology to make the diagnosis of a rare lung disease faster. Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis kills 40,000 people every year in the U.S. but can take more than two years to successfully diagnose. The platform created by OSIC, PwC and Microsoft will enable the sharing anonymized global imaging and clinical data that will reduce diagnosis time resulting in improved quality of life for patients.

Cloudnine Hospitals, a chain of more than 20 hospitals in India focusing on maternity and neonatal care worked with Hitachi Vantara to create a scalable data storage infrastructure that improved staff access to data and met government compliance requirements for retention.

Digital health and wellness app provider Kilo Heath used Fivetran to scale its data science functionality, keeping up with surging growth. Kilo says the analytics solution with integrated connectors enables its team to optimize the collection, analysis and insights it draws from an exploding amount of data, automating the work of three to four data scientists.