Enabling a Secure, Scalable Data Platform Across a Hospital Network

Background

The customer is a regional healthcare network operating five hospital sites across Ontario. They needed a modern data platform to consolidate data from disparate clinical and operational systems and enable secure, PHI-compliant analytics. Keyrus was selected to lead the data strategy, platform implementation, and dashboard delivery. To add some excitement to the implementation – the healthcare network went live with a new electronic health records system during the delivery. Which complicated the 12+ sources we needed to integrate into the new platform.

Challenge

The customer faced the complex task of consolidating data from 12+ disparate systems, including their EHRs, financial platforms, cloud-hosted tools, and third-party vendor feeds, into a unified and secure data platform. Many of these systems had inconsistent access protocols, limited documentation, and varying data quality levels, requiring deep technical and business discovery to establish ingestion readiness. Compounding the technical challenge was the need to support through its first major adoption of a modern, externally hosted cloud data platform - Microsoft Fabric. This involved: - Conducting detailed vendor evaluations between Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric - Supporting internal privacy impact assessments (PIAs) to meet provincial healthcare data protection standards - Navigating governance and cybersecurity reviews to authorize cloud-based access beyond the hospital network firewall - Aligning with internal teams who had limited cloud platform experience, requiring education and process alignment for authentication, data obfuscation, and access provisioning - Keyrus worked side-by-side with internal privacy, IT security, and operations teams to ensure that organizational trust, compliance, and readiness were built in parallel with the technology.

Approach

Discovery & Strategy: Over a six-week discovery period, Keyrus led an intensive assessment of 12+ source systems, including electronic health records, finance systems, HR platforms, and external vendor feeds. This included data profiling, system capability reviews, and working sessions with internal teams to define use cases. A key decision point was evaluating Microsoft Fabric versus traditional Azure components, where we led technical deep dives and stakeholder workshops to align on scalability, security, and fit for healthcare. Platform Implementation, Governance & Enablement: We addressed significant security, governance, and data access hurdles to successfully deploy Microsoft Fabric—hosted externally from their internal network—ensuring compliance with PHI and privacy regulations. This involved close collaboration with internal teams to navigate Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs), Security Threat and Risk Assessments (STRAs), and to support a broader organizational shift toward cloud analytics governance. A robust medallion architecture was implemented (Bronze → Silver → Gold) with clearly defined landing zones, refined layers, and curated semantic-ready datasets. We established secure data traffic channels, designed row-level security models, and implemented obfuscation logic to protect PHI/PII across the pipeline. Delivery & Repeatable Operationalization: Keyrus built data ingestion pipelines for six priority systems, transforming source data into business-ready formats. We delivered Power BI dashboards and structured outputs to support operational, financial, and clinical decision-making. The implementation included a repeatable ingestion and transformation process, allowing the customer to scale to new systems and use cases as needed.

Key results

Benefits

- Cloud-Hosted Architecture: The customer now operates a PHI-compliant cloud data platform with Microsoft Fabric, enabling modern data practices across hospitals. - Governance-Driven Implementation: Successfully navigated privacy, risk, and governance hurdles, making this a first-of-its-kind implementation for the organization. - Actionable Reporting: Delivered Power BI dashboards that align with business needs for finance, operations, and clinical insight. - Future-Proof Foundation: A repeatable data onboarding process is now in place, enabling sustainable growth and the addition of future use cases. - Security by Design: PHI/PII is protected through a combination of obfuscation logic, row-level security, and access protocols, embedded into the platform architecture.

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