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August 23, 2023

British Columbia’s Provincial Health Services Authority improves healthcare through better data access, insights with Azure

When Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) began seeing the need to deliver faster, more comprehensive health insights to healthcare workers across British Columbia, it took action. Old, unstandardized requests were slowing data analysis and the sharing of insights. To standardize and speed data access, PHSA moved its healthcare analytics platform to Microsoft Azure, creating a readily accessible data analysis platform that is scalable and secure. Data requests that once took many months now take only days. Because of the sensitive nature of health data, PHSA has worked closely with Microsoft to make sure health data never leaves Canada and is kept highly secure.

Provincial Health Services Authority

Migrating enterprise data warehouse to Microsoft Azure for fast and secure health data insights

The Provincial Health Services Authority’s (PHSA) 22,000 employees work hard to improve the health and quality of life for every citizen in the province through specialized healthcare services offered close to where they live. PHSA also works to assure this same equity and accessibility extends to its employees. After all, the more comprehensive the information PSHA staff can access and analyze, the better the care they can provide.

PHSA decided to move its enterprise data warehouse to the cloud and create the Platform for Analytics and Data (PANDA). It opted to build PANDA on Microsoft Azure and designed it to improve health data access, literacy, and analytics for once-siloed healthcare data analysts and scientists throughout PHSA.

Project PANDA was still in the planning stage at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. “In 2019, we were providing data analytics as a traditional nine-to-five service,” says Ali Mussavi, Executive Director, Data Architecture and Governance at PHSA. When the pandemic began in 2020, PHSA staff set out to do everything they could to help people through it. That meant better information, faster. “We had to deliver critical metrics like COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, hospital bed capacity, and ventilator capacity on a daily basis so that leadership at British Columbia’s health authorities and Ministry of Health (MoH) knew exactly where things stood at a given time,” Mussavi continues. “We needed the capabilities of Azure to innovate and attempt a new approach for data analytics”. In order to get more accurate and timely information, PHSA also needed to collaborate more closely with MoH and other health authorities in BC. It was an inflection point for PANDA, and planning quickly turned to action and implementation.

Despite the urgency of the situation, PHSA’s Data Analytics and Reporting Evaluation (DARE) had to be careful. PHSA handles highly sensitive patient information. Data management and security had to remain top priorities. “We recognized and appreciated all the thought and investment around data protection that Microsoft put into Azure and its infrastructure,” acknowledges Jalud Abdulmenan, Manager of Data Engineering and Business Intelligence at PHSA. PHSA worked with Microsoft to assure that all health data housed in Azure stays in Canada, in line with governmental regulations.

The only province-wide healthcare provider in British Columbia, PHSA is now the province’s largest health organization to move its analytics platform to the cloud. It did so while meeting or exceeding all of British Columbia’s data security laws and regulations, including the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). “We looked into other cloud providers, and Microsoft got it right,” says Abdulmenan. “The groundwork they laid, and the time and effort they put into our implementation simply has no comparison.”

Equitable data access delivered when caregivers and patients need it

After establishing PANDA on Azure, PHSA could break down the organization’s data silos. In the past, if a PHSA analyst working for one specialized program wanted access to data from the Ministry of Health or another program or health authority, they would need to submit a request for specific datasets. If they received datasets that were too limited in scope to be useful, they’d have to resubmit the request. “We’d see people getting snippets of data when they really needed a more comprehensive view,” says Abdulmenan. “By bringing everyone to a single, central data platform through Azure, they can quickly get the answers that they need to make informed, data-driven decisions in both clinical and operational areas of the organization.”

Not only did employees often have to file multiple requests to obtain the data they need, they also couldn’t share that data with other teams within PHSA—even if those teams were working toward related public health benefits. Despite the slowdowns in data sharing, much of this process has historically been necessary in order to assure the highest possible levels of privacy and security around sensitive patient data as it passes between siloed agencies and ministries. The process has also meant that the MoH often had to field multiple requests for a single dataset from different silos within PHSA. “At one time, we had between 30 and 40 agreements with the MoH for the same or very similar datasets,” recalls Mussavi. “And because each request had a unique intent, each had to be fulfilled with a customized portion of the overall datasets.”

From end to end, the process of identifying a need for data, drafting a data sharing agreement, coming to a mutual understanding of the agreement, creating a bespoke dataset, and delivering it could take as long as a year. Even the fastest turnaround times were easily a month. “Once we fully establish our unified data platform (PANDA) in phase two, everything will speed up immensely,” says Mussavi. “The scalability of Azure services empowers us to centralize all data holdings for analytics in a single platform that lead to significant efficiencies for data governance.”

Delivering big-picture insights that inform health of provincial residents

PHSA has completed phase one of PANDA, moving its entire data and analytics platform to Azure. This has granted PHSA personnel access to not just the data itself but also to the scalability of the cloud and new collaboration and analytics capabilities through SharePoint and Power BI. “Scalability has already proven to be a huge benefit,” says Abdulmenan. “When our needs increase, we can opt for more powerful virtual machines, and when we no longer need that capacity, we can reduce our operating costs by scaling capacity back down. This allows PHSA analytics to nimbly react to the most unexpected situations.”

In PANDA phase 2, PHSA plans to further deepen the analytical power of its data platform while simultaneously providing even more layered data security. A proof of concept for Microsoft Purview, which expands data governance controls across clouds, devices, and platforms, is in the works. PHSA also aims to push the boundaries of the data-driven insights obtained by its decision makers, clinicians, and researchers. PANDA will provide advanced analytics tools and capabilities that will eventually improve PHSA’s capability maturity model for Data and Analytics. “When all is said and done, our goal is to provide reliable services and regular access to data for healthcare programs across British Columbia to help them deliver the best care possible,” says Mussavi. “We’re improving our ability to access and make sense of broad sources of data that ultimately could impact the health of BC residents for the better.”

“The scalability of Azure services empowers us to centralize all data holdings for analytics in a single platform that lead to significant efficiencies for data governance.”

Ali Mussavi, Executive Director, Data Architecture and Governance, PHSA

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