 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto, California studios. Here with our quarantine crew, we're getting all the remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. And we've got two great remote guests here, Archini Musavi, who's the executive director of analytical services and data governance at UNC HealthCare and Sonya Jordan, Enterprise Analytics Manager of Data Governance at UNC Health. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. So I'm super excited, University of North Carolina, my daughter will be a freshman this year and she is coming. So hopefully she won't have to visit UNC Health, but I'm looking forward to having more visits down there, it's a great place. So thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. Okay, so the conversation today is going to be about how data and how analytics are helping solve problems and ultimately in your case, serve the community. And this is super important conversation. So before we get started, talk about UNC Health, what's going on there, how you guys are going to, how big is it, what are some of the challenges that you have? So UNC Health is comprised of about 12 different entities within our hospital system. We have physician groups as well as hospitals and we serve, we're spread through all of North Carolina and so we serve the patients of North Carolina and that is our primary focus and our responsibility for our mission. As part of the office that Sonia and I are in, we are in the Enterprise Analytics and Data Sciences office that serves all of those entities. And so we are centrally located in the triangle area of North Carolina, which is pretty central to this day. And we serve all of our entities equally from our analytics and data governance needs. You guys got different customer base, obviously you get the clinical support and you got the business applications. You got to be agile, that's what it's all about today. You don't need to rely on IT support. How do you guys do that? What's the framework? How do you guys tackle that problem of being agile, having the data be available? And you got two different customers. You got all the compliance issues with clinical and you got all the regulations involved and you got the business applications. How do you handle those? Yeah, so for us in the roles that we are in, we are fully responsible for really more of the data and analytics needs of the organization. And so we provide services that truly are balanced across our clinician group. So we have physicians and nurses and all of the other ancillary clinical staff that we support, as well as the operational needs as well. So revenue cycle, finance, pharmacy, any of those groups that are required in order to run a healthcare system. So we balance our time amongst all of those. And really for the work that we take on and how we continuously support them is really based on governance at the end of the day. How we make decisions around what the priorities are and what needs to happen next and requires the best insights is really how we focus on what work we do next. As for the applications that we build, we really in our office, we truly only build analytical applications or products like visualization within Tableau as well as we support data governance platforms and services. So we provide some of the tools that enable our end users to be able to really interact with the information that we're providing around analytics and insights at the end of the day. Sonya, what's your job? Your title is analytics manager of data governance. Obviously that sounds broad, but governance is obviously required in all things. What is your job? What's your day to day? What's your focus? Well, my day to day operations is first around building a data governance program. I try to work with identifying customers who we can start partnering with so that we can start getting documentation and utilizing a lot of the programs that we currently have such as certification. So when we talk about initiatives, this is one of the initiatives that we use to partner with our stakeholders in order to start bringing disabilities to the various assets such as metrics or universes that we wanna certify or dashboards, algorithm, you know, just various lists of different types of assets that we certify that we like to partner with the customers in order for them to start documenting within the tools so that we can bring visibility to what's available, really focusing on data literacy, helping people to understand what assets are available, but not only what assets are available, but who owns them and who own the asset and what can they do with it, making sure that we have a great documentation in order to be able to leverage literacy as well. So I can only imagine with how much volume you're dealing from a data standpoint and the diversity, the data warehouse must be massive or it must be architected in a way that it can be agile because of the needs, the diverse needs. Can you guys share your thoughts and how you guys look at the data warehouse challenge and opportunity and what are you guys currently doing? Well, yeah, you go ahead, Rajini. God, Zonya. Yeah, well, last year we implemented a tool, Enterprise Warehouse that we implemented and that was an opportunity for data governance to really lay some foundation and really bring visibility to the work that we could provide for the enterprise. We were able to embed into probably about seven or six or seven of the 13 initiatives that was actually within that project and with that, we were able to develop our stewardship committee, our data governance council and because that Rajini managed data solutions, our data solution manager was able to really help with the architect and integration of the tools. Rajini, your thoughts around data warehouse because you got to have flexibility for new types of data sources. How do you look at that? Yeah, so as Zonya just mentioned, we upgraded our data warehouse platform just recently because of these evolving needs and like a lot of healthcare providers out there, a lot of them are either one or the other EMRs that are top in the market. With our EMR, they provide their own data warehouse so you have to factor almost the impact of what they bring to the table in with in addition to all of those other sources of data that you're trying to co-mingle and bring together into the same data warehouse and so for us, it was time for us to evolve our data warehouse. We ended up deciding on trying to create a virtual data warehouse and in doing so with virtualization, we had to upgrade our platform which is what created that opportunity that Zonya was mentioning and by moving to this new platform, we are now able to bring all of that into one space and it's enabled us to think about how does the community of analysts interact with the data? How do we make that available to them in a secure way in a way that they can take advantage of reusable master data files that could be our source of truth within our data warehouse while also being able to have the flexibility to build what they need in their own functional spaces so that they can get the wealth of information that they need out of the same source and it's available to everyone. Okay, so I got to ask the question and I was trying to get the good stuff out first but let's get into the reality of COVID-19. You got pre-COVID-19 pandemic, we're kind of in the middle of it and people are looking at strategies to come out of it. Obviously the world will be changed. However, a lot of virtualization, virtual meetings and virtual workforce but the business still needs to run but data will be changing different sources. How are you guys responding to that crisis because you're going to be leaned on heavily for more and more support? Yeah, it's been non-stop since March. Yeah, so I'm going to tell you about the reporting aspects of it and then I'd love to turn it over to Sonya to tell you about some of the great things that we've actually been able to do to enhance our data governance program by not wasting this terrible event and this opportunity that's come up. So with COVID, when it kicked off back in March, we actually formed a war room to address the needs around reporting analytics and just insights that our executives needed. And so in doing so, we created within the first week, our first weekend, actually our first dashboard and within the next two weeks we had about eight or nine other dashboards that were available and we continuously add to that. Information is so critical to our executives, to our clinicians, to be able to know how to address the evolving needs of COVID-19 and how we need to respond. We literally, and I'm not even exaggerating at this very moment, we have probably, let's see, I think it's seven different forecasts that we're trying to build all at the same time to try and help us prepare for this new recovery, this ramp-up efforts. So to your point, it started off as we're shutting down so that we can flatten the curve, but now as we try to also reopen at the same time while we're still meeting the needs of our COVID patients, there's this balancing act that we're trying to keep up with. And so analytics is playing a critical factor in doing that. Yeah. Sonya, your thoughts, first of all, congratulations. And action is what defines the players from the pretenders in my mind, you're seeing that play out. So congratulations for taking great action. I know you're working hard. Sonya, your thoughts, COVID, it's putting a lot of pressure. It highlights the weaknesses and strengths of what's kind of out there. What's your thoughts? Well, it's just require a great deal of collaboration and making sure that you're documenting metrics in a way where you're capturing true definition because at the end of this information that's going to a dashboard, that's going to be visualized across the organization. I think what COVID has done was really enhanced the need and the understanding of why data governance is important. And also it has allowed us to create a lot of standardization where we're standardizing a lot of processes that we currently have in place, but just enhancing them. You know, not to go on a tangent, but I will. It's funny how the reality has kind of like pulled back, you know, exposed a lot of things, whether it's the remote work situation, people are VPNing, not under provision on the IT side. On the data side, everyone now understands the quality of the data, right? I mean, I got my kids talking regression analysis, all the curves are all wrong. I mean, people are now seeing the science behind the data. They're looking at grass all the time. You guys are in the visualization piece. This really highlights the need of data as a story because there's impact and to quality data. And if you don't have the data, the story isn't being told and then misinformation comes out of it. And this is actually playing out in real time. So it's not like it's just a use case for the most analytics, but this again highlights the value proposition of what you guys do. What's your personal thoughts on all this? Because this really is playing out globally. Yeah, it's been amazing how much information is out there. So we have been extremely blessed at times, but also burdened at times by that amount of information. So there's the data that's going through our healthcare system that we're trying to manage and wrangle and do that data storytelling so that people can drive those insights to very effective decisions. But there's also all of this external data that we're trying to be able to leverage as well. And this is where the whole sharing of information can sometimes become really hard to try and get ahead of. You know, we leveraged the John Hopkins data for some time, but that too can have some hiccups in terms of what's available. We try to use our state department of health and human services data and they just about updated their website and how information was being shared every other week and it was making it impossible for us to ingest that into our dashboards that we were providing. And so there's really great opportunities but also risks in some of the information that we're pulling. Sonya, what's your thoughts? I was just having a conversation this morning with the chief of analytics and insight from NOAA, which is the national oceanic administration about weather data and how forecasting weather. And they've got this community model where they're trying to get the edges to kind of come in. This teases out a template. You guys have multiple locations. As you get more democratized in the connection points, whether it's third party data, having a system managing that is hard. And again, this is a new trend that's emerging. This community connection points where I think you guys also might be a template of multiple locations. What's your general thoughts on that? Because the data is coming in and it's now connected in, whether it's first party to the healthcare system or third party. Yeah, well, we have been leveraging our data governance tool to try to create that centralized location, making sure that we obtain the documentations due to COVID, everything is moving very fast. So it requires us to really sit down and capture the information. And when you don't have enough resources in order to do that, it's easily to miss some very important information. So really trying to encourage people to understand the reason why we have data governance tools in order for them to leverage in order to capture the documentation in a way that it can tell the story about the data. But most of all, to be able to capture it in a way so that if that person happened to leave the organization, we're not spending a lot of time trying to figure out how was this information created? How was this dashboard design? Where are the requirements? Where are the specifications? Where are the key elements? Where does that information live? Making sure we capture that up front. So guys, you guys are using Informatica. How are they helping you? Ashley, they have a system. They're getting some great feedback on, how are you using Informatica? How is it going? And how has that enabled you guys to be successful? Yeah, so we decided on Informatica after doing a really thorough vetting of all of the other vendors in the industry that could provide us these services. We've really loved the capabilities that we've been able to provide to our customers at this point. It's evolving I think for us. The ability to partner with the group, like prominence to be able to really leverage the capabilities of Informatica and then be really super hyper focused on providing data literacy back to our end users and making that the full intent of what we're doing within data governance has really enabled us to take the tools and make it something that's specific to UNC health and the needs that our end users are verbalizing and provide that to them in a very positive way. So they talk about this master catalog and I've talked to the CEO of Informatica and all their leaders. Governance is a big part of it. I've always said, I've always kind of had a hard time. I'm an entrepreneur. I like to innovate, move fast, break things, which is kind of not the way you are in the data world. You don't want to be breaking anything. So how do you balance governance and compliance with innovation? This has been a key topic and I know they have that you guys are using their enterprise data catalog. Is that helping? How does that fit in? Is that part of it? Well, yeah. So during our COVID initiatives and building these Tableau dashboard, these visualizations and forecast models for executive leaders, we were able to document and empower you, which we rebranded Axon to empower. We were able to document a lot of our dashboards, which is a data set and pretty much document attributes and show lineage from Empower to EDC so that users would know exactly when they start looking at the visualization, not only what does this information mean, but they're also able to see what other sources that that information impact, as well as the data lineage, where did the information come from in EDC? So I got to ask the question to kind of wrap things up. Has Informatica helped you guys out now that you're in this crisis? I'll see you implemented before. Now that you're in middle of it, have you seen any things that jumped out at you that's been helpful? And are there areas that need to be worked on? So you guys continue to fight the good fight, come out of this thing stronger than before you came in? Yeah, there's a lot of new information. What we consider as AHA moment is that we've been learning about Empower. Yes, there's definitely a learning curve because we implemented EDC and Empower last year doing our warehouse implementation. And so there's a lot of work that still needs to be done, but based on where we were the first of the year, I can say we have evolved tremendously due to a lot of the pandemic issues that arise. And we're looking to really evolve even greater and pilot across the entire organization so that they can start leveraging these tools for their needs. Archie, any thoughts on your end on what's worked, what you see improvements coming, anything to share? Yeah, so we're talking about some of the new capabilities like the marketplace, for example, that's available in AXON. We're looking forward to being able to take advantage of some of these great new aspects of the tool so that we can really focus more on providing those insights back to our end users. I think for us during COVID, it's really been about how do we take advantage of the immediate needs that are surfacing? How do we build all of these dashboards in record-breaking time, but also make sure that folks understand exactly what's being represented within those dashboards? And so being able to provide that through our Informatica tools and surface it back to our end users almost in a seamless way, like it's built into our dashboards has been a really critical factor for us in feeling like we could provide that level of transparency. And so I think that's where as we evolve that we would look for more opportunities to how do we make it simple for people to get that immediate answers to their questions of what does the information need without it feeling like they're going elsewhere with information. Well, Richie, thank you so much for your insight, Sonya, as well, thanks for the insight and stay safe. Sonya, behind you, I was pointing out that's your artwork. You painted that picture. Looks beautiful. Yes, I did. You got two jobs. You're an artist and you're data-engaging governance. Yes, I am and I enjoy painting. That's how I relapse. Looks great. You get that on the market soon. You get in the marketplace. Yeah. Get that going. Appreciate the time. Thank you so much for the insights and stay safe. And again, congratulations on the hard work you're doing. I know it's still a lot more to do. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios for the remote interviews with Informatica. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.