A new study from McKinsey warns that profit pools in the healthcare industry are likely to be flat due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this stagnancy, the study identifies a number of opportunities for innovation in the industry. “Rewiring organizations for speed and efficiency, adapting to an ecosystem model, and scaling innovations to deliver meaningful changes are only some of the ways that helping both healthcare players and patients is possible,” the study says.

Data is an important enabler of these opportunities. Snowflake’s new Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud helps organizations leverage data so they can advance medical innovation and deliver better health outcomes for patients.

Here are four features of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud that help empower industry organizations to boost innovation and thrive in today’s challenging economy: 

1. Scale and performance: Snowflake’s elastic performance and intelligent automation support industry organizations’ unique operational needs, and run numerous workloads with scale and performance across all three public clouds. 

2. Data sharing and collaboration: Snowflake enables customers to connect with the data they need in a timely manner—both within their organization and within the broader clinical, research, and business ecosystem. With Snowflake’s secure data sharing technology, organizations share references to the live data set and can revoke access to the data set whenever needed, enabling secure data collaboration. 

3. Security: Snowflake enables organizations to seamlessly adhere to stringent security requirements. Snowflake offers support for HIPAA compliance,is HITRUST certified, authorized at the FedRAMP Moderate level (in certain regions), and GxP compatible to satisfy the needs of healthcare and life sciences customers.

4. New product enhancements: Customers can benefit from new product enhancements that were developed to meet the needs of today’s healthcare and life sciences organizations, including: 

• Data governance enhancements: Snowflake provides industry-leading features that enable high levels of governance, including dynamic data masking, role-based access controls, and support for GxP compatibility audits.
• OHDSI OMOP data model and ecosystem: Snowflake supports this open source, community-backed initiative that is accelerating advanced analytics and collaboration across the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem.
• Snowpark: As Snowflake’s developer framework, Snowpark allows data engineers, data scientists, and data developers to code in their familiar way with their language of choice, and execute pipeline, ML workflow, and data apps faster and more securely, in a single platform.
• HL7/FHIR: Snowflake can be leveraged to ingest, process, and run analytics on HL7/FHIR messages.
• Unstructured data: Snowflake supports many types of unstructured data, enabling organizations to store, enrich, and derive insights from sources such as clinical documents and DICOM files. 
• HITRUST Certified: HITRUST is a certifiable and recommended framework trusted by many health networks and hospitals to manage risk. Achieving HITRUST HIGH compliance demonstrates Snowflake’s commitment to the security of confidential information as well as compliance mandates such as HIPAA.

For more information on how Snowflake’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud can help your organization unlock the next generation of innovation, visit Snowflake for Healthcare & Life Sciences.