Imagine trying to piece together a complex puzzle, but the pieces you need are scattered across multiple rooms, some of them are locked in vaults, and others are written in a language you don’t understand. That’s the reality for many healthcare organizations today: they struggle to manage the constantly growing volume of highly sensitive data they collect.
For UZ Leuven, one of Belgium’s largest university hospitals, this data puzzle was a major obstacle to their mission of providing exceptional care and advancing medical research. They needed a secure, centralized, and accessible platform to discover new insights and share relevant data for a specific task or research project. Let’s take a closer look at how the experts at Tensr and Agiliz helped them to consolidate multiple data sources into a unified and futureproof data platform powered by Google Cloud
What was UZ Leuven’s challenge?
UZ Leuven faced a challenge familiar to many other healthcare institutions: data silos. Their clinical data was fragmented across multiple sources, making it difficult and time-consuming to access and analyze. Imagine a doctor or nurse trying to make a critical decision about a patient’s treatment but having to navigate several systems and data sets to gather the necessary information.
Making things even more complicated was the sensitive nature of patient data. UZ Leuven needed to make sure that any new solution would meet the strictest security and compliance standards and keep up with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. They simply couldn’t afford to compromise patient privacy or risk violating legal requirements.
UZ Leuven, with its deep roots in academic research, understood the transformative power of data, so they came up with an ambitious plan. Their next-generation data platform had to simplify secure data sharing, include modern self-service analytics, and be ready for next-generation AI-driven data processing. They called it the dataontsluitingsproject (DOP project), referring to the information disclosure capabilities of the new platform.
Building a solid, secure data platform
We brought together the best Google Cloud experts from within the Cronos Group, including seasoned consultants from Tensr and Agiliz. Using their tried-and-true six-phased approach, they helped UZ Leuven to evaluate the different possibilities and design a future-proof data architecture that meets all their requirements.
As the foundation of their solution, they selected BigQuery, Google’s powerful and scalable data warehouse that could easily handle UZ Leuven’s vast amount of clinical data. To get data flowing smoothly from all those different sources, we implemented data pipelines using Google Cloud’s Dataflow service. And to make sure that UZ Leuven could easily manage and govern their entire data landscape, we used Google Cloud Dataplex.
Of course, we knew that security and compliance couldn’t be an afterthought; they were top of mind with every architectural decision we made. We implemented multiple solutions to strengthen the platform’s security, including strict access controls to guarantee that only authorized users could access the datasets. We combined Google Cloud’s security features with our own expertise in data privacy to build a platform that met the highest standards.
To ensure complete accountability, we also implemented robust logging and traceability measures, enabling UZ Leuven to track every data access event. This gave UZ Leuven the confidence that patient privacy was protected every step of the way.
Unlocking insights with Looker
Building a secure data platform was just the first step. To truly unlock the value of UZ Leuven’s data, we will also need to make it accessible and actionable for a wide range of users with varying needs and different levels of technical proficiency, from doctors and nurses to researchers and administrators.
To address the diverse needs, the platform offers multiple methods to explore the data, including Google Sheets and Jupyter Notebook, which are used by their researchers. However, the majority of users will access their data through Looker, Google’s powerful platform for BI and Data Visualization. This will provide UZ Leuven with:
- Interactive dashboards based on the specific needs of different user groups, where they can explore data, identify trends, and gain insights to inform their decisions.
- Self-service analytics, so UZ Leuven’s teams can perform their own analyses, which reduces reliance on IT and lets them answer their own data-driven questions.
- A single source of truth, since Looker will bring together data from across UZ Leuven’s systems into a unified view that eliminates inconsistencies
- Centralized business logic and metrics through LookML, Looker’s powerful semantic modeling language.
What started as a vendor-contract for Google Cloud support and billing services, evolved into a strategic partnership where GC innovate’s experts became trusted advisors towards UZ Leuven’s IT teams. Their expertise was instrumental for us to make the right choices and to build our new state-of-the-art data platform
A data-driven transformation
The impact of the new data platform is nothing short of transformative for UZ Leuven and its many teams, on several levels.
- Physicians now have faster access to critical patient information, letting them make more informed decisions and ultimately provide better care.
- Researchers can use the platform’s power to analyze large datasets, helping to accelerate the pace of medical discovery.
- Behind the scenes, streamlined data access and automated reporting processes have freed up valuable time and resources for UZ Leuven’s staff, boosting operational efficiency across the board.
This case is another great example of the power of Google Cloud technology, the expertise of Cronos’ competence centers, and the collaborative spirit that drives innovation in healthcare. In fact, we recently received the Google Cloud Public Sector Partner of the Year Award for Healthcare in the EMEA region because of projects like these. We couldn’t be happier with the recognition!
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