In the healthcare industry, data has evolved as a strategic asset, capable of transforming patient care, improving operational efficiency, and driving innovation. The major challenge for healthcare organizations is how they monetize this data responsibly while adhering to patient privacy policies and strict regulatory standards.
McKinsey research shows that companies that effectively monetize their data are three times more likely to report that these efforts contribute over 20% of their total revenue. This highlights the tangible business impact of strategic data use.
In this blog, we explore in detail data monetization in healthcare, how organizations can use it to drive revenue, improve patient outcomes, personalize medication, and foster innovation. We’ll outline how Snowflake empowers healthcare organizations to securely integrate, analyze, and share data, to turn healthcare data into insights, revenue, and better care.
What is Data Monetization in Healthcare?
Data monetization refers to the approach of using information in order to produce a measurable economic benefit. In healthcare, this means using the vast amounts of patient information, medical records, and clinical knowledge to generate revenue or create value, reduce costs, and improve decision-making.
Key areas include:
Patient records: Leveraged for research, personalized medicine, and enhancing patient outcomes.
Clinical trials: Data from trials is monetized through partnerships, research initiatives, and drug development.
Operational data: Used to gain insights into hospital and clinic operations, improving efficiency and reducing costs.
True monetization involves transforming raw information into insights, products, or services that deliver value. It also helps in creating pre-packaged datasets, offering subscription-based insights, or using AI and analytics to optimize operations. So, data monetization is effective in boosting profitability for healthcare organizations and advancing patient care across the industry.
Why Healthcare Data Monetization Matters?
With the industry shifting from volume-based care to value-based care, harnessing data monetization effectively can be a crucial strategy for healthcare organizations to enhance their market position and drive growth. Below are the key pointers highlighting the need for data monetization in healthcare:
Growing Demand for Insights
Healthcare payers and providers are dependent on real-time data for clinical development purposes, to support research, predict disease progression, and care delivery. So, health organizations are under pressure to extract more valuable insights from the data. This growing demand represents a significant opportunity for healthcare organizations to monetize their historical data, to enable research, enhance efficiency, and improve patient outcomes.
Sustainable Revenue Growth
Monetizing healthcare data allows organizations to create revenue streams. Data monetization enables organizations to analyze and gain the maximum value for health data to generate economic returns. Furthermore, increased availability of data creates more opportunities for innovation, drug development, and clinical trials to meet specific customer needs and sustainable financial growth.
Decreases Operating Expenses
Monetizing healthcare data can directly reduce costs by optimizing internal operations and resource allocation. It helps to understand resource utilization, such as medical equipment, facilities, and personnel. This helps to allocate resources more strategically based on need and availability. Data-driven insights allow better scheduling, reduce patient readmissions, and lower operating expenses.
Better Patient Outcomes
While healthcare data monetization is often referenced with direct thought to revenue and profits, the true value runs much deeper into advanced patient care. It empowers providers to deliver personalized, proactive, and effective health services. Predictive analytics and AI can guide personalized treatment plans, improve recovery rates, and reduce complications. Data-driven offering increases patient engagement and eliminates errors caused by fragmented systems.
Key Challenges in Monetizing Healthcare Data
Data monetization in healthcare brings immense potential but also faces unique challenges. Here are some critical considerations for healthcare leaders:
Fragmented Data Systems and Siloed Information
Healthcare organizations often operate on multiple platforms, such as electronic health records (EHRs), lab systems, imaging systems, patient wearables, and insurance databases. These datasets are stored in different systems, which create data silos, leading to delays, errors, incomplete patient views, and poor patient outcomes. For data monetization, this fragmentation is a major challenge because insights require consolidated, high-quality data from multiple sources. It also hinders organizations from gaining analytics, developing predictive models, or offering value-added services.
Data Security and Cybersecurity Threats
Healthcare data is a prime target for cybercriminals due to its high market value. Ransomware attacks, breaches, and unauthorized access have risen sharply, putting patient privacy at risk. Even with de-identification procedures, the chance to re-identify individuals exists, threatening patient privacy. For organizations, these data breaches are expensive, leading to significant financial losses, operational downtime, and damage to reputation, which erodes customer trust.
Data Quality and Consistency
Poor data quality and consistency are major challenges in healthcare data monetization. Different healthcare systems use varied formats, codes, and terminologies, making data integration difficult and creating inconsistencies across platforms. This includes inaccurate or incomplete records, a lack of standardization in formats, data silos due to decentralized systems, and issues with data timeliness. These problems undermine analytical models, unreliable insights, reduce credibility, and affect the commercial use of healthcare data.
Regulatory Compliance and Privacy Concerns
Strict regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and other regional laws impose stringent rules on how personal health information is collected, used, and shared, impacting monetization. Strategies. Even anonymized or de-identified data must be handled with care, as improper practices can quickly lead to breaches of trust or costly fines. Beyond legal compliance, healthcare organizations also face an ethical responsibility to maintain transparency in patient data usage. Non-compliance can result in severe fines, legal liabilities, and loss of public trust, making regulatory compliance a critical but complex barrier to data monetization.
How Snowflake Enables Healthcare Data Monetization
Snowflake offers a secure, scalable, and unified platform for healthcare organizations to transform data into value-driven insights and new revenue opportunities. Snowflake Marketplace and Native App Framework enable organizations to build and distribute applications within the Snowflake cloud, which helps to reach a wider network of healthcare partners and customers.
Data Products for Monetization
Data monetization helps to provide and upgrade products or services by creating new revenue streams through sharing patient data. The Snowflake Marketplace lets you offer datasets like claims, pharmacy trends, or social determinants of health (SDoH) to trusted partners. This can also help in creating a personalized product or curated dataset tailored to specific partner needs. Healthcare organizations can choose flexible pricing models, like subscriptions or pay-per-use, to create new revenue streams.
Data Quality and Enrichment
Snowflake ensures patient and clinical data are accurate, complete, and reliable for healthcare decision-making. Providers and payers use Snowflake Data Cloud to build and manage an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI), a centralized database that links and deduplicates patient records across different healthcare systems. This ensures a single, accurate view of each patient.
Snowflake also supports industry standards like HL7/FHIR, ICD-10, SNOMED, and LOINC, ensuring data is consistent across systems and easy to share. Healthcare organizations can link external datasets such as SDoH, genomics, or real-world patient data. Additionally, automated data pipelines continuously clean, match, and validate data, eliminating manual work and ensuring high-quality data for monetization.
Analytics and AI Enablement
Snowflake helps to analyze healthcare data and monetize the insights derived from it. This is like how analyst firms operate—they collect data, generate reports, and sell valuable insights. Using Snowflake, organizations can create pre-built dashboards, KPIs, and visualizations to highlight trends in patient care, operational efficiency, and population health. It doesn’t stop there; Snowpark provides AI and ML workloads for data, allowing predictive models to predict risk scores or disease progression.
Data as a Service
Data as a Service (DaaS) allows healthcare organizations to provide data on demand to partners, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and other stakeholders. It includes patient claims, pharmacy trends, clinical outcomes, and social determinants of health (SDoH). Snowflake enables healthcare data to be made API-ready and accessible in real time, allowing seamless integration into analytics workflows.
Conclusion
Healthcare data is more than information; it can be your revenue-generating and insight-driven asset. Data monetization helps healthcare organizations to generate revenue, improve patient outcomes, and drive operational efficiency. Businesses can use secure, scalable, and unified Snowflake platforms to integrate and enrich data, build analytics and AI models, and deliver Data-as-a-Service. Snowflake helps to monetize data effectively while maintaining strict privacy and compliance, building patient trust, and delivering personalized care, smarter decision-making, and sustainable growth.
