FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCIES DIAL 111

Data driven decision making is one step closer thanks to Ventures

01 July 2020

Pinnacle Midlands Health Network have been working closely with AWS Partner Ventures for just over a year now to modernise and streamline their data.

In 2019 Ventures built a rapid proof of concept in four weeks which demonstrated how Pinnacle could move from a traditional data warehouse set up to a modern data lake. That project resulted in Ventures being able to cost out that a full data lake implementation on AWS would cost around 1/10th of Pinnacle’s platform costs at that time.

Since then Ventures have been working on designing a full implementation plan for an AWS data lake.

With data coming from a range of sources every day, at high volume, the Ventures team needed to make sure they could be flexible to meet changing business demands.

Additionally, Ventures and Pinnacle were really interested in the gains around transparency and auditability that could be made by using services like CloudFormation. Ventures worked closely with Pinnacle business and clinical experts to understand exactly what Pinnacle needed to get from the data and turned this into an implementation roadmap.

In May 2020 Ventures implemented an automated process to pick up all Pinnacle data from the Ministry of Health - alongside having access to all the data from Pinnacle’s general practice sites in AWS. Ventures are now working on switching out some of Pinnacle’s reporting products to utilise the new data lake, with big plans for extending and using more of this data, and the flexibility it provides, in the future.

Pinnacle has had a long-standing role in safeguarding the health records of nearly half a million people across the Midland region. Data driven decision making is essential for health services to keep up with the health needs of the people they serve. By teaming up with AWS Partner Ventures Pinnacle can look forward to a future where they can get all the value from all their data, at a fraction of what it previously cost.