A major public health organization in the Asia Pacific region, serving nearly two million residents across hospitals, aged care, and emergency services, set out to modernize its data architecture to improve care coordination and enable real time decisions. While Snowflake provided a scalable platform for analytics and reporting, many clinical systems were managed independently by local health networks and implemented with varying configurations, even when based on the same core software. This lack of consistency, combined with strict data privacy controls, made full centralization impractical. By deploying Denodo as the logical data access and governance layer, the organization bridged this gap, delivering secure, policy enforced access to over 90 priority systems in real time while keeping sensitive data in place.
Why Denodo
- Provided a secure data protection layer across the hybrid architecture, ensuring sensitive patient records remained in place and fully governed
- Enabled cost-effective analytics with selective caching into Snowflake, avoiding unnecessary replication while supporting high-performance reporting
- Delivered a unified semantic layer across clinical systems, abstracting legacy and vendor-managed complexity in a way unmatched by other platforms
- Enabled federated governance and real-time data delivery across both operational and analytical environments – all through Denodo’s single logical access layer
Challenges
The health agency faced persistent barriers that blocked progress:
- Lack of real-time visibility into operational capacity, including ambulance dispatches and ED wait times
- Fragmented Electronic Medical Record system implementations with no shared common business semantic model across the local health networks
- Privacy and governance risks from uncontrolled replication of sensitive patient data
- Fragile integration across vendor-managed systems lacking APIs or CDC support
These challenges led to a strategic shift away from centralization, toward a federated data model.
Solution
Denodo was deployed as the central business semantic and data access layer, providing data protection and enabling governed, real-time access across the environment. Over 90 critical systems including EMR, pathology, imaging, and patient services were connected through Denodo.
The platform supported selective caching into Snowflake for high-performance use cases, while enabling live access to operational systems where replication was not viable.
Access control, policy enforcement, auditing, and data delivery were all routed through Denodo’s unified interface, aligning with strict healthcare mandates.
The solution was built on four key design principles:
- Unified semantic layer across EMR, pathology, imaging, and patient services
- One “front door” for access control, policy enforcement, logging, and auditing
- RESTful APIs and secure caching for both clinical and analytical workloads
- Access strictly confined to internal networks to align with healthcare privacy mandates
Benefits
- Federated Governance with Data Protection Layer: Access to over 90 clinical systems is now controlled through a single logical layer, with Denodo enforcing fine-grained access, masking, and audit policies. Sensitive data remains in place, eliminating the risks of duplication and ensuring compliance across all regions.
- Real Time Visibility to Enhance Healthcare and Clinical Operations: Denodo enables live access to operational systems, powering dashboards that support ambulance triage, emergency department load balancing, and patient flow management – all with up-to-date data.
- Faster Onboarding and Data Delivery: System onboarding times dropped from months to days. Standardized business semantic views allow clinical, research, and operational teams to work from a consistent and trusted data foundation.
- Maximizing Value Across a Hybrid Environment: By connecting Snowflake with other clinical systems, Denodo supports both analytical and clinical use cases without moving or duplicating sensitive data, delivering speed, scale, and security across the entire landscape.
