Case Study
How UST helped an academic medical center build an enterprise-grade clinical data ecosystem on Microsoft Fabric
UST unified clinical, research, and operational data on Microsoft Fabric, strengthening governance and accelerating access to trusted insights.
What used to take days now takes minutes. A leading academic medical center partnered with UST to unify its EHR, imaging, claims, and clinical trial data on Microsoft Fabric and built a governed platform ready for the AI era of care.
CLIENT OVERVIEW
A leading academic medical center in a major U.S. city, affiliated with a nationally recognized school of medicine, serves a large and diverse urban population while advancing major trauma care, transplant surgery, and active clinical research. Behind that mission sat a growing data challenge: vast volumes of clinical and operational data spread across Epic EHR, imaging systems, claims, social determinants of health, and clinical trial platforms.
THE CHALLENGE
Fragmented data. Slowed insight. Rising risks.
The organization faced a challenge familiar to large academic medical centers: years of clinical, operational, and research data scattered across disconnected systems. EHR records, DICOM imaging data, claims, social determinants of health, and clinical trial information each lived in separate silos, with no unified view and no shared infrastructure for analytics.
The impact was felt most acutely in clinical research, where valuable data existed across multiple systems but lacked a unified, governed foundation. Teams spent considerable effort locating, validating, and preparing data before insights could be generated. Each new analytics initiative required custom integration work, slowing delivery and limiting the organization's ability to scale advanced analytics and AI.
Governance added further pressure. HIPAA compliance demanded strong auditability, role-based access control, and end-to-end data lineage, not as an afterthought but embedded by design. Without a modern data platform, each new use case added complexity and risk.
To move beyond isolated analytics projects, the organization needed an enterprise data platform that could unify information, strengthen governance, and accelerate analytics across clinical, research, and operational domains.
THE TRANSFORMATION
With a unified and governed data foundation in place, the organization is now positioned to expand advanced analytics, machine learning, and future AI initiatives. Standardized ingestion, metadata, and lineage reduce the preparation required before trusted data can support new use cases.
Unified data lakehouse on Microsoft Fabric
UST built an enterprise analytics platform on Microsoft Fabric, bringing structured and unstructured data from Epic EHR records, DICOM imaging, and other source systems into a scalable lakehouse environment. Reusable data models and pipelines were designed from the start to reduce duplication, accelerate time-to-insight, and support new use cases without repeated re-engineering.
Accelerated access to trusted data
One of the earliest and highest-impact outcomes was the establishment of standardized data access patterns across the organization. Researchers, analysts, and technical teams gained a consistent way to discover, access, and consume data without relying on custom extracts and one-off integration efforts. What previously required significant manual coordination can now be supported through reusable pipelines, shared data assets, and governed access controls.
Governance and compliance by design
Data governance was embedded as a foundational capability. Through Microsoft Purview integration, UST delivered end-to-end data lineage, role-based access controls, and continuous compliance monitoring. Sensitive clinical and research data can now be used with confidence, with full auditability built into the platform architecture and HIPAA requirements met at every layer. Security was treated as a solution area in its own right; a core design principle, spanning identity, access, data classification, and threat posture across the entire Azure and Fabric estate.
AI-ready data foundation
A critical outcome of the engagement was the creation of an AI-ready data estate. By standardizing data ingestion, governance, metadata management, and lineage tracking, the organization established the foundation necessary to support advanced analytics, machine learning, and future AI initiatives. New use cases can now leverage trusted, governed data without the extensive preparation effort previously required.
Enterprise product and infrastructure support
Beyond the analytics platform, UST's partnership extends across the organization's broader digital estate. This includes the go-live of HARQ, an enterprise emergency alerting platform, in February 2026, Azure infrastructure and DevOps support, and ongoing planning for Epic on Azure. UST continues to provide durable support for cloud operations, product development, and strategic data leadership as the organization's long-term technology partner.
THE IMPACT
Across clinical research, operations, governance, and enterprise infrastructure, the platform delivers measurable performance gains and a foundation built for what comes next.
How the outcomes compound
Reusable ingestion pipelines and standardized transformation patterns mean new data sources are onboarded in a fraction of the time — without rebuilding from scratch for each initiative. Direct OneLake consumption, materialized lake views, and reusable gold layer semantic models eliminate redundant data copies, cutting movement overhead by 90% while improving consistency across every downstream report.
With automated lineage scanning continuously tracking new, changed, and onboarded assets, governance is embedded in the architecture rather than treated as a manual checkpoint. Trusted reports and reusable semantic models reduce validation effort, so business users spend more time acting on data; while each new use case builds on the same governed foundation.
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