Every health system will benefit immensely from AI: from improving patient outcomes and reducing physician friction to optimizing the revenue cycle. Despite the influx of technology, hospitals and health systems are struggling to realize this value.
For healthcare delivery organizations, the main problem is highly fragmented data and AI estates. Patient records in electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging in PACS systems, streaming telemetry from bedside monitors, and unstructured clinical notes are all silos. This fragmentation leads to disjointed security policies, lock-in of critical operational and clinical data, and AI sprawl without proper enterprise semantics.
Furthermore, creating and producing HIPAA-compliant AI agents is incredibly difficult, especially when trying to balance computational cost versus clinical quality and safety.
Maximizing AI potential starts with your data
Databricks unifies and democratizes all your data and AI, designed to safely and efficiently handle the complexity of the healthcare environment. But to create a single source of truth, you must first unlock your data from old silos. Fivetran can help.
Traditionally, extracting data from complex EHRs meant engineers spent weeks creating brittle, custom ETL scripts. Today, Fivetran’s Epic Clarity Connector accelerates this process by providing a fully managed, zero-code pipeline. It automatically and securely extracts rich clinical and operational data from Epic Clarity and syncs it directly into Databricks.
By automating change data capture (CDC) and schema mapping, Fivetran eliminates manual extraction efforts, allowing health systems to flow critical data into Databricks. In minutes instead of months.
With Fivetran feeding the platform, the Databricks strategy is built on two fundamental steps:
- Develop a common data foundation: Integrate your hospital data architecture with Lakehouse Architecture for large-scale data storage, Lakeflow for ingestion and streaming (perfect for real-time HL7/FHIR feeds and IoT bedside monitors), and Lakebase for serverless Postgres. This integrated foundation provides the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and breaks the vendor lock-in cycle typical of legacy healthcare IT.
- Integrate all your governance: Leverage Unity Catalog to provide unified, tight governance for all assets. In healthcare, this is important for PHI and HIPAA compliance. Unity Catalog controls not only traditional tables, but also predictive models, AI agents, PDFs (such as scanned referral documents), and raw files.
Optimizing referral management: Start with your enterprise referrals
Once a controlled data foundation is established, health systems can deliver their unique clinical and operational context to AI. By applying AI that truly understands your specific hospital protocols, patient population, and payer contracts, Databricks enables transformational use cases for healthcare delivery.
For hospital leadership, getting patients specialized care in a timely manner while keeping them within the health system’s network is a top priority. Optimizing referral management to prevent network leakage is a major challenge. till 50% of referrals Fall into a “black hole” as data becomes fragmented across paper faxes, Epic Clarity databases, and external payer systems.
They simply lack visibility into whether a patient actually scheduled or attended their follow-up.
By harnessing the full potential of Fivetran-ingested data within Databricks, leaders can unlock immense business value. AI models can:
- Predict referral no-shows
- Identify the root causes of out-of-network leakageAnd
- Automatically recommend the next best in-network expert Based on availability and proximity.
Once data is integrated under a common platform, your data team will need to model that data and prepare it for reporting and activation. Fivetran offers a robust toolset for transforming data, including in-platform quickstart data models for common SaaS platforms, integration with DBT and Coalesce, and net new capabilities:
- AI Column Builder To enrich your data with additional fields powered by the AI provider of your choice like ChatGPT, Cloud and Gemini
- audience builder To create a custom audience segment
Then, when that data is ready, you can send it to the applications where your team works, to help them use the data to make decisions in their daily platforms.
Data activation ensures that data is not locked in dashboards, static reports, or data warehouses. Health care administrators and medical professionals need to access sensitive, timely data with minimal friction or delay. It is not practical for doctors and nurses – or their staff – to spend hours learning SQL and sifting through business intelligence platforms when there is an urgent need to focus their attention elsewhere.
fivetran activation Supports end-to-end management of the referral lifecycle by integrating data from ordering, scheduling, and completed visits. With that data, you can model the patient journey between providers, flow in provider networks, capacity and leakage, and standardize referral metrics.
Critical insights from these models can be sent to all types of operational systems, whether to notify end users or trigger automated actions.
Building production AI agents and democratizing insights for care teams
With Fivetran and Databricks, we are making it easier to empower health systems to build and deploy secure, clinical-grade data and AI apps.
Interacting with your data in natural language AI/BI GenieHospital administrators, nursing managers and medical directors can talk to their data virtually. They can explore questions about patient flow, readmission rates, or ED wait times and get instant information through natural language, data tables, and visualizations.
Health systems can deploy production AI agents that achieve high quality at low cost. For example, as AstraZeneca used agent bricks To parse over 400,000 complex clinical trial documents, a hospital can deploy agents to extract structured data points from decades of historical unstructured medical records – without requiring their IT teams to write complex code.
By accelerating data ingestion with Fivetran and integrating analytics and AI on Databricks, health systems can move from fragmented IT to a truly intelligent healthcare delivery network.
Join us at HIMSS!
If you are heading to HIMSS26, check us out Session At the Databricks booth (#5453), Wednesday, March 12:00 – 12:00 pm PT. And if we don’t get a chance to see you in Vegas, join us at our upcoming webinar, Wednesday April 15th at 9am PDT (Add).
