Beyond the Data Warehouse: Rethinking AI Enablement in Healthcare

October 14 at 6:00 – 8:00pm

HealthVerity
1818 Market St #700, Philadelphia, PA 19103

For fifteen years, healthcare’s answer to “how do we use our data” has been the same: build a bigger, more centralized warehouse. There was a real reason for it – an EHR only sees its own records, and crucial context, including outcomes, lives elsewhere. Assemble enough of it in one place, the thinking went, and you’d eventually have a dataset worth training a model clinicians could trust. That bet no longer makes sense. LLM capability has outpaced the value of massive retrospective data repositories — and the EHR data those repositories depend on remains largely locked away by vendors with little incentive to open it, FHIR and HL7 mandates notwithstanding. Meanwhile, the cost and context loss of feeding population-scale datasets to an LLM makes the monolithic approach impractical on its own terms.

This talk argues for a different bet, one healthcare has seen before: the same resistance-then-rapid-adoption pattern that played out with BYOD in the 2000s is playing out again, this time with data architecture. Instead of retrospective, warehouse-first analytics, the better question is how to safely AI-enable specific roles across care delivery, transactionally, using transformation pipelines rather than monoliths. Much of that opportunity doesn’t depend on EHR data at all. One example: leveraging a model to route incoming messages, propose responses, and automate follow-up.

Using AWS as the toolset — data lake infrastructure, Glue, Lake Formation, governance and cataloging, and Bedrock for compliance-conscious model integration — we’ll walk through an architecture that treats the LLM as swappable rather than fixed, and show what a secure, auditable, role-specific AI enablement pipeline actually looks like in practice.

Speaker: Cliff Cavanaugh

As Founder of Healthjump, Cliff led the creation of one of the largest clinical data networks in the United States. Today, roughly a third of the U.S. population has a doctor connected through the platform.

Under his leadership, the team at Healthjump attained certifications from the ONC, NCQA and HITRUST positioning the company as a trusted infrastructure provider in health data exchange. After growing their install-base to thousands of medical practices across the country, he drove the successful acquisition and integration of Healthjump into Datavant. By deploying Healthjump’s connector technology into Datavant’s network of networks, this created the largest health data exchange in the U.S.

Prior to Healthjump, Cliff co-founded DataTrade Solutions, which delivered custom health IT and analytics solutions to health systems including Mercy, Trinity Health, and Penn Medicine before its acquisition in 2015.

Cliff has significantly impacted regulatory frameworks, assisting CMS with the development of Clinical Quality Measures for Meaningful Use stage 3 and serving as a member of the RAPID Informatics Work Group at the FDA.

Cliff’s work has been recognized across academia and industry, with speaking engagements at prestigious institutions including MIT and Yale, as well as major industry events hosted by the FDA and HIMSS.