Microsoft Fabric

In recent years, the Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) industry have experienced significant transformations, driven by the convergence of Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This convergence has reshaped various aspects of the industry, including patient care management, clinical decision-making processes, research endeavors, and operational efficiency.

The adoption of AI in healthcare is anticipated to accelerate, with projections indicating that the market will reach $164.16 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 49.1% during the forecast period ⁽¹⁾. This growth underscores the transformative potential of AI technologies in revolutionizing healthcare systems worldwide.

Intelligent Data and AI platforms, particularly Microsoft Fabric, are at the forefront, enabling breakthroughs and transforming healthcare delivery and accelerating innovations. 

Healthcare's Key Data Challenges

The healthcare industry operates in a highly complex and regulated environment where data sensitivity and compliance requirements create significant challenges. While Intelligent Data and AI platforms offer transformative potential, healthcare organizations must overcome numerous obstacles to fully harness their benefits. Here are some key challenges that the healthcare industry faces: 

Data Silos

Fragmented data across disparate systems hinder seamless access and integration, making it difficult to extract valuable insights. 

Data Quality

Ensuring data quality and safeguarding sensitive patient information against cyberattacks remain as ongoing struggles. 

Regulatory Compliance

Compliance with various regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR, adds another layer of complexity, necessitating robust governance frameworks. 

Interoperability

The lack of standardization complicates the interoperability of data exchange among different healthcare systems and devices. 

Actionable Insights & Scalability

Extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data requires advanced analytics capabilities. Scalability challenges arise with the exponential growth of data, especially with the adoption of digital health technologies. 

Balancing Innovation & Responsibility

Navigating the intersection of data-driven innovation, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance requires careful planning, collaboration, and responsible AI adoption.

Although over 80% of healthcare executives prioritize AI adoption, a lack of data readiness continues to hinder lasting progress. To fully leverage AI’s potential, healthcare organizations need robust AI-driven technology capabilities, strong governance frameworks, and a resilient infrastructure that ensures seamless data management, regulatory compliance, and scalable innovation. 

Healthcare Solutions by Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric – an end-to-end, a comprehensive Unified Data and AI platform that seamlessly integrates all essential data and analytics tools into a single ecosystem. Fabric goes beyond generic solutions by offering industry-specific capabilities designed to address the unique challenges faced by HLS industry.  By tailoring data solutions to the specific needs of the healthcare industry, Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and achieve optimal results.

When combined with Healthcare industry solutions, Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities to build a robust Data and AI platform tailored to address the challenges mentioned above. Healthcare data solutions within Microsoft Fabric provide an holistic, analytics SaaS platform that enables organizations to ingest, store, and analyze healthcare data from various sources, including electronic health records, picture archiving, communication systems, and more.

Enterprises can expedite their time-to-value by leveraging Microsoft Fabric's healthcare industry solutions. The platform allows organizations to efficiently manage the complexities of healthcare data and harness the transformative potential of Data and AI-driven insights. Below is a reference architecture how these components come together to form a cohesive solution. 

Data Ingestion

With native connectors like Fabric Data Factory and Azure Health Data Services (FHIR Datasets), organizations can easily ingest a wide array of data from disparate sources (EMR/EHR, Clinical Records, Imaging Data- FHIR, Claims Data, SDOH Data, Regulatory Data) into OneLake storage within Microsoft Fabric. Real Time Intelligence can be leveraged for processing streaming Healthcare data. OneLake serves as a unified data management solution, efficiently storing large volumes of data, breaking down silos, and offering cost-effective storage. It is seamlessly integrated into every Microsoft Fabric tenant, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure management 

Data Management

Implement the medallion architecture pattern using Microsoft OneLake and Lakehouse capabilities. This architecture pattern involves organizing data across three layers: Bronze (Raw), Silver (Curated and Augmented), and Gold (Business-level Aggregated) layers (Lakehouse) to facilitate seamless data processing and analytics. This multi-layered approach establishes a single source of truth for enterprise data products. The lakehouse architecture in Microsoft Fabric combines both Data Lakes and Data Warehouses, storing data in open file format (delta-parquet) and this enables to run large-scale analytics workloads in a cost-effective manner. 

Data Engineering

Leverage Microsoft Fabric's Synapse Data Engineering Notebooks, Fabric Data Factory (LCNC), Real-Time Intelligence capabilities to develop scalable data pipelines. These pipelines consolidate and transform data according to target data domains and analytics data stores, aligning with industry-standard data models (e.g. FHIR). This ensures interoperability and adherence to industry standards.  

We can also leverage Microsoft fabric’s User Data Functions to implement and re-use custom, specialized business logic in Fabric data engineering and data science notebooks, enabling developers to more easily build custom experiences and improve efficiency for healthcare data initiatives 

Analytics and Insights

To access and derive actionable insights from healthcare data within Microsoft Fabric, organizations can utilize familiar tools such as Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse SQL-endpoint, Synapse Data Science Notebooks, Power BI (with copilot), Custom Copilot, RAG, Agentic AI solutions leveraging Azure OpenAI Services and Cosmos DB (Vector DB). Examples include patient cohort analysis, risk stratification models, and longitudinal patient view, patient insights through custom copilot and RAG applications etc. 

Platform Operationalization

Integrate Azure DevOps capabilities seamlessly with Microsoft Fabric to automate and streamline the operationalization of data platforms. This integration enables faster delivery of changes, improved reliability, and enhanced collaboration among development, operations, and data teams, ensuring efficient data platform management and evolution. Healthcare IT administrators can now utilize enhanced Capacity Metrics Apps within Fabric to meticulously monitor data usage and optimize resource allocation across critical healthcare systems. These updates provide detailed chargeback reports for departmental usage (e.g., radiology, pathology), multi-capacity insights for diverse data workloads (like genomic sequencing and clinical trial analysis), and historical performance lineage for compliance audits.

The new Fabric CLI terminal will allow you to execute commands across Fabric using interactive command-line prompts or a script. It provides a code-first, no clicks experience for users and admins who want to explore and use Fabric via code. There are additional CI/CD enhancements that will enable end-to-end CI/CD support across the Fabric platform with the introduction of variable libraries for workspaces, Service principal support for GitHub, deployment pipelines Fabric APIs phase II.

Comprehensive Data Governance

Azure Purview and Microsoft Fabric together provide a holistic data governance solution tailored for the healthcare and life sciences industry. This solution enables organizations to establish and enforce robust data governance standards and processes, ensuring data privacy, regulatory compliance, data quality & data security.  

Purview, integrated with Copilot in Fabric for Power BI, now strengthens healthcare data governance and compliance. It automatically detects sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI) in Copilot interactions, provides tailored security recommendations for HIPAA compliance, and allows for thorough audits of AI-driven data analysis to mitigate risks associated with unauthorized PHI access or usage. Healthcare security administrators can now leverage Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) within Fabric to automatically detect uploads of sensitive PHI data, such as patient medical records or insurance details, across diverse data sources including KQL databases and mirrored data lakes.

OneLake security takes the healthcare data protection to next level where you will have to define access once, and Fabric enforces it consistently across all engines. It enables robust security measures to protect data and control access at rows and column level. By leveraging these technologies, organizations can harness the full potential of their data, driving innovation, improving patient outcomes, and maintaining the highest standards of data governance and security.

Microsoft Fabric offers a powerful solution for the data challenges plaguing the healthcare industry. It enables seamless integration, efficient data management, and innovative patient engagement features. But implementing and harnessing its full potential requires expertise. Sonata played a pivotal role in the development of Microsoft Fabric and were honored to be its Featured and Launch Partner. Our team possesses deep industry knowledge and extensive experience in crafting customized solutions for the unique problems faced by healthcare organizations. Contact Sonata today to discuss how we can help you leverage this powerful platform to achieve your digital transformation goals.

Reference

(1) https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/14/3009462/28124/en/164-Bn-Artificial-Intelligence-AI-in-Healthcare-Markets-Global-Forecast-to-2030-Market-to-Grow-at-a-CAGR-of-49-1-with-Koninklijke-Philips-Microsoft-Siemens-NVIDIA-and-Epic-Systems-.html

In today's healthcare landscape, payers and hospitals are faced with the challenge of managing and utilizing vast amounts of disparate data from various sources. However, only a fraction of this data is actually usable at any given time. To put the scale of healthcare data into perspective, the World Economic Forum highlights a staggering fact: hospitals generate approximately 50 petabytes of isolated data annually. And surprisingly, about 80% of this data is unstructured thereby withholding valuable insights.

Real-time data insights are crucial for enhancing patient care and aiding payers and providers, particularly for elderly and critical care patients. One of the biggest challenges for payers and customers alike is the ever-increasing cost of healthcare. Providing the right care along with the value has become primary driver for the industry. All this can become possible only when data flows seamlessly, yet secured.

The Solution Fabric

In the swiftly evolving healthcare technology landscape, Microsoft is setting a new benchmark with its latest innovation: Microsoft Fabric for the Healthcare Industry. This transformative technology promises to revolutionize how healthcare providers manage data, collaborate, and deliver patient care. As we approach the official unveiling of Microsoft Fabric at the upcoming event by Sonata Software, anticipation is building among healthcare professionals and IT experts alike. Here's what we can expect from this groundbreaking technology.

A New Era of Integration and Interoperability

The commitment to seamless integration and interoperability is at the heart of Microsoft Fabric for the Healthcare Industry. Healthcare payers & providers often grapple with siloed information systems that hinder efficient data exchange and collaboration. According to a report, the lack of data analytics hinders innovation and contributes to the administrative complexity that’s linked to more than $265 billion in unnecessary annual healthcare spending in the United States.

Microsoft Fabric aims to bridge these gaps, offering a unified platform by adopting FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Exchange) and OMOP (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership) as a standard for exchanging patient information that ensures secure and smooth communication between healthcare systems and devices.

Sonata enhances the implementation with NLP Driven Industry Catalog, Pre-mapping with SAAS systems/Industry data model, Self-Healing Data Operations suite.

Enhanced Data Management and Analysis

Data is the lifeblood of modern healthcare, driving everything from personalized treatment plans to epidemiological research. The global healthcare analytics market size was valued at USD 43.1 billion in 2023 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.1% from 2024 to 2030.

Microsoft Fabric leverages cutting-edge data management and analysis tools to help healthcare organizations harness the full potential of their data. With advanced analytics and AI capabilities, providers can gain deeper insights into patient health, improve diagnostic accuracy, and develop more effective treatment strategies.

Sonata helps in faster setup of Fabric with insights Driven Engineering Model, Automated Data and Pipelines Migrations.

Empowering Patient-Centered Care

Microsoft Fabric places a strong emphasis on supporting patient-centered care. The platform is designed to facilitate easier access to health records, enabling patients to take a more active role in their health management. Additionally, by streamlining communication channels between patients and providers with its ‘Patient outreach analytics’ Microsoft Fabric ensures that patients can receive timely and personalized care, enhancing overall patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Bolstering Security and Compliance

In the digital age, the security and privacy of health information are paramount. About 725 healthcare data breaches were reported to OCR in 2023. Microsoft Fabric is built with robust security measures to protect sensitive health data against cyber threats. Furthermore, the platform is designed to comply with healthcare regulations and standards, ensuring that organizations can meet their legal and ethical obligations while leveraging the benefits of digital innovation.

What to Expect at the Upcoming Event

The upcoming event promises to be a milestone occasion, offering attendees a firsthand look at Microsoft Fabric's capabilities and potential impact on the healthcare industry. Participants can expect:

• Live Demonstrations: Witness the power and versatility of Microsoft Fabric through live demos showcasing its integration, data management, and patient engagement features.
• Expert Insights: Hear from Microsoft executives and leading healthcare professionals about the vision behind Microsoft Fabric and its role in shaping the future of healthcare technology.
• Collaborative Opportunities: Engage with peers, industry experts from Sonata and Microsoft to explore collaborative initiatives and learn how Microsoft Fabric can be tailored to meet specific organizational needs.

Conclusion

As we stand on the cusp of a new digital era in healthcare, Microsoft Fabric represents a pivotal step forward in our quest to enhance healthcare delivery, patient outcomes, and data-driven decision-making. The upcoming event is more than just a showcase; it's a glimpse into the future of healthcare, illuminated by the promise of technological innovation. Contact Sonata for an assessment to adopt Fabric faster or inquire about Sonata's assistance with Fabric adoption in decentralized and disconnected data environments. Stay tuned, as we embark on this exciting journey together, unlocking the potential of Microsoft Fabric for the healthcare industry.

Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) companies find themselves at an inflection point, driven by various macro factors including anemic pipelines, intense competition, rise of personalized medicine, medication affordability, pricing pressures, and increasing cost of operations.  A vast majority of HLS companies are embracing digital transformation as a key strategic lever to address these challenges and gain competitive advantage. While data is central to AI-driven digital transformation, HLS companies face significant challenge on that front. 

The HLS Data Challenge

The healthcare industry alone generates 30% of global data volumes and is trending higher. This massive data volume challenge is compounded by other issues such as - legacy data silos, data quality, interoperability, privacy and security, and global regulatory compliance.  These data challenges directly contribute to increased total cost of ownership (TCO), lack of real-time insights, absence of a single version of truth across the organization, expensive data engineering, and limited AI opportunities.

With a well-crafted data management strategy and platform, HLS organizations can unlock the power of data and gain valuable insights to optimize new drug development, achieve operational efficiencies, and improve patient outcomes.

Here's where Microsoft Fabric and Healthcare Cloud steps in.

Fabric can be leveraged to address data and analytics challenges and drive digital transformation across the value chain. To comprehend the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, first, let’s understand what Fabric is and what it can do.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, an all-in-one analytics solution that offers a comprehensive suite of services from ingestion to insights on a unified platform. Through a layer of abstraction and One Lake architecture, Fabric provides an integrated view of enterprise data regardless of the source or storage.  It helps users to seamlessly access enterprise data to build real-time analytics, or enables data engineers to build data pipelines without the need for extensive ETL workloads.

Microsoft Fabric's industry-specific capabilities provide a powerful framework to address challenges head-on. By customizing data solutions, organizations can unlock new opportunities, drive innovation, and achieve optimal outcomes.

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Having introduced Microsoft Fabric as an integrated suite of tools that unifies data, applications, and services across the healthcare ecosystem, let's now delve into its game-changing aspect: Healthcare Cloud, a powerful platform that can transform the healthcare journey.

What is Microsoft Healthcare Cloud? 

Microsoft Healthcare Cloud, built on Microsoft Fabric, is an industry solution designed specifically for life sciences and healthcare. It’s a unifying platform that brings together the entire healthcare ecosystem to improve clinical and operational outcomes. Within the healthcare cloud, Microsoft provides sample datasets (FHIR, SDOH), pre-defined mappings, connectors, and pipelines to help create a unified view of disparate AI-ready data. By leveraging the Healthcare Cloud, organizations can operate within a secure, compliant, and scalable environment, ensuring data privacy, promoting interoperability, and facilitating seamless collaboration.

Let’s now explore how Microsoft Fabric and the Healthcare Cloud can facilitate digital transformation across the HLS value chain.

Drug Discovery: Microsoft Fabric's ability to house data from various sources, including semantic literature searches, knowledge bases, and biomedical knowledge corpus, empowers researchers to identify lead molecules with clinical viability more efficiently. By leveraging AI solutions within Microsoft Fabric, researchers can comb through millions of data points, dramatically reducing drug discovery time.

Synthetic clinical trial data: Traditional placebo-based clinical trials, especially in case of rare and chronic diseases, can create ethical issues due to the rarity of subjects. Microsoft's Healthcare Cloud, with its built-in FHIR data model, enables the easy ingestion and storage of large amounts of patient data. This data can then be used to generate synthetic clinical trial data that mimics real patient data, without any data privacy and ethical concerns while facilitating research and analysis.

Healthcare Data Interoperability: Data interoperability presents several challenges including lack of robust longitudinal view and analysis of patient records. Pre-built mapping between FIHR and OMAP CDM makes is easy to ingest and run analytics and prediction on longitudinal patient records.

SDOH Datasets: Healthcare Cloud provides access to Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) datasets, which is crucial in improving population health outcomes. These data sets combined with other information could yield valuable insights into identifying viable clinical trial sites and subjects.

Control Towers for Resilient Supply Chains: Enterprise supply chain applications are complex structure data in a variety of formats and schemas. Control towers play a vital role in maintaining supply chain resiliency and draw insights from several enterprise applications including, ERPs, WMS, TMS, Planning and Execution systems etc.  Fabric can provide a unified view and insights across all these disparate datasets.

Customer Centricity: Customers often have various queries that require real-time responses, ranging from product shipment status to return processes. Addressing these queries necessitates gathering data from multiple systems and providing the required answers. With a unified data view from Fabric, AI can generate the required information in real-time directly to customers through a self-service portal or to customer service representatives interacting with them.

Predictive Plant Maintenance: Unplanned production downtime is very expensive and disruptive. By leveraging data streams from IoT sensors and hubs, Fabric can ingest and analyze this data in real-time to identify failure patterns. In the case of equipment failure prediction, appropriate remediations and preventive actions can be taken.

Regulatory compliance: Life sciences companies often generate periodic reports and submit them to regulatory authorities to ensure compliance. These reports require data from various applications such as Regulatory Information Management (RIM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS), Pharmacovigilance (PV), and more. Fabric offers a unified view of these disparate datasets, ready for AI to generate reports in real-time. This eliminates the need for expensive Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and data integration efforts.

By leveraging a unified SaaS platform like Microsoft Fabric, healthcare companies can unlock valuable insights across various areas, including clinical summarization, medication adherence dashboards, quality metric reporting, enabling risk predictions, and performing clinical research. Microsoft Fabric and Healthcare Cloud offer a unified SaaS platform that enables the processing of large volumes of disparate datasets, from data ingestion to generating actionable insights. This solution has the potential to become an enterprise data backbone, serving as the foundation for multiple industry use cases for business users, data engineers, data scientists, and clinical and operational teams.

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric: Real-World Story

Since 2023, Microsoft has been actively testing healthcare data solutions within Microsoft Fabric and gathering feedback from its customers. One notable organization exploring these solutions is the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. With an annual total extramural research support of $524 million and a faculty of over 2,000 full-time members, they are leveraging healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to power their Colorectal Cancer Multi-Modal Data Commons.  

By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, the university is accelerating their efforts to unify data from various sources to create an ecosystem that enables secure, ethical, and reproducible data management and analytics. This will further drive innovative clinical and translational research for the promotion of health in Wisconsin and beyond.

Microsoft Fabric offers a powerful solution for the data challenges plaguing the healthcare industry. But implementing and harnessing its full potential requires expertise. Sonata played a pivotal role in the development of Microsoft Fabric and were honored to be its Featured and Launch Partner. Our team possesses deep industry knowledge and extensive experience in crafting customized solutions for the unique problems faced by healthcare organizations. Contact Sonata today to discuss how we can help you leverage this powerful platform to achieve your digital transformation goals.

About the Author: Sujan Thanjavuru is a thought leader with 25 years of industry and enterprise transformation expertise. He specializes in driving end-to-end digital transformation across the value chain and is a trusted advisor to our clients. He heads the Life Sciences domain practice at Sonata.