Roads, aqueducts, bridges, and walls — the Roman Empire built serious infrastructure. And infrastructure in turn built the Roman Empire, enabling the free flow of commerce, ideas, and information. My colleague, Analytics Director Dave Dixon, pointed out in his recent blog that Salesforce data infrastructure, in a way, performs the same function now.

To extend my colleague’s analogy, just as Roman aqueducts, sewage systems, and public baths increased hygiene and disease prevention in ancient times, data is powering better outcomes in healthcare today. But while healthcare is incredibly rich in data, it’s also in urgent need of straight, paved roads to clear out the clutter for both patients and caregivers.

Electronic health records, medical insurance claims, genetic sequencing, remote patient monitoring, and patient engagement platforms — data inputs in healthcare are endless. And the data is only getting bigger. Researchers at Seagate forecast that healthcare will see a 36% annualized growth rate in data captured by 2025, more than any other industry.

The right data to the right people

The ecosystem of people who need access to data is also daunting, including not just primary care providers, but care managers, clinicians, hospital systems, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical companies. And they can all benefit from a holistic view of data for individuals and populations at large.

The issue isn’t the data itself; it’s getting it to the right people in the right way. We need a better way to orchestrate data in a way that drives insights, improves patient outcomes, facilitates medical decision-making, and cuts inefficiencies.

Salesforce has strengthened their investment in this space by acquiring data visualization leader Tableau and investing in the Snowflake Data Cloud. These three now work together to provide organizations with a sane and sturdy infrastructure that powers the secure sharing of data and analysis within and between organizations. Data infrastructure is one of those things that might not sound exciting, but the potential impact on people’s lives is tremendous.

Supercharging patient care

Imagine a care manager in charge of creating a patient’s individualized care plan. With the right infrastructure in place, she can open the patient’s record in the Salesforce Health Cloud platform and see everything she needs, including their medical history, doctor notes, and prescriptions. She sees an embedded Tableau dashboard with both Salesforce data and externally sourced data housed in Snowflake. Electronic health record (EHR) data, wearable device data, patient preferences and engagement data, analytics of care plans for patients with similar histories, and diagnoses based on large-scale third-party data — all of this is presented cleanly and clearly, without the need to wade through thickets of irrelevant screens or manually switch between data sources. Tedium and clutter are removed, and time — always a precious commodity in healthcare — can be focused on the needs of the patient.

Note that the combination of patient data and large-scale third-party data is crucial. The goal is not to look at what happens on average for people’s health, but to combine individual patient data with data from comparable populations. The ideal state is the ability to relate clinical data (e.g., study results) with individual health data (e.g., individual patient traits and history).

To be clear, this won’t remove all uncertainty, or diminish the need for professional judgment on the part of our hypothetical care manager making use of all these tools. But it will give her access to vital information at the touch of a button so she can do what she does best and not waste time tracking information she needs from countless disparate sources.

Bringing it all together — securely

Let’s take a closer look at the need to combine data from multiple sources in a coherent, consumable way. We’ve found Snowflake is the key here. Snowflake provides a place to centralize healthcare data into a single entity that can be shared both internally and externally, with built-in security and governance that supports HIPAA, SOC1 and 2 Type II, PCI DSS and FedRAMP. Access to live datasets can be granted to the right people in a secure way, and analytics can be built to bring many sources into a unified view of healthcare data, for either an individual patient or a specific population.

Another key: Salesforce Health Cloud. In the pharmaceutical industry, companies using Salesforce Health Cloud for clinical trial management and patient support can combine various forms of patient and trial data. This results in insights on how to run smoother trials and identifies potential roadblocks, such as low patient enrollment. Medical device companies using Health Cloud to manage provider relationships and standardize sales processes can surface data from Snowflake on device effectiveness for patients and combine it with sales trends.

The promise of infrastructure

When we think of the power of Salesforce, Snowflake, and Tableau together as a way to build data infrastructure and deliver outcome-based analytics that drive action, there’s nearly limitless potential for improving the lives and outcomes of healthcare for providers, patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

Like the Romans laying a foundation for improved public health through their sweeping infrastructure projects, Salesforce, combined with the power of Snowflake and Tableau, is doing the same.

They’re paving straight, clear roads for data to come together with Snowflake, and lighting the way with Tableau-powered insights. The result, for those who get on board with the need to invest in data infrastructure, is better, faster decision-making, and better care for patients.

And fortunately for us, while Rome wasn’t built in a day, digital infrastructure scales a lot more quickly.