In December 2024, UCI Health completed three simultaneous milestones: it integrated four newly acquired hospitals onto a unified technology platform, opened a brand-new $1.2 billion hospital, and migrated from a shared Epic instance to its own dedicated one — all at once.
“In my career, I haven’t seen any organization taking all these three major initiatives all at the same time,” said Mayil Dharmarajan, vice president of data analytics at UCI Irvine, who joined UCI Health 18 months ago as vice president of data and analytics. “I’m very proud that as a UCI coworker we made everything happen.”
The health system, an academic medical center in Southern California, had been operating with roughly 350 beds before the expansion. Now, as a seven-hospital enterprise, Mr. Dharmarajan is focused on transforming the data and analytics infrastructure to match the organization’s new scale.
The move to a dedicated Epic instance was a catalyst. It gave UCI Health control over its own feature roadmap and opened the door to leveraging the FHIR API framework more aggressively — reducing reliance on costly health information exchange technology and enabling analytics to be embedded directly back into clinical and operational workflows.
“We leverage the maximum opportunities to use a technical framework so it can also help us in cutting some of the costs related to the HIE technology,” Mr. Dharmarajan said.
On the artificial intelligence front, UCI Health is deliberately shifting its posture. Like many health systems, it has accumulated a collection of pilots and proof-of-concept projects. The priority now is moving those from experimentation into production with governance structures that can sustain them.
“We are moving from the typical AI pilot demos to productionizing those AI projects and making sure that appropriate governance structure [is] put in place to enable people across our organization from either operations or clinical departments to use technology like Abridge for scribes as well as Community Cycle and Research to make sure they have the appropriate tool they can use in a more effective way to do their job,” he said.
Tools like AI-powered scribing are already in use among clinicians, but Mr. Dharmarajan sees the harder work as building the model repositories, regulatory alignment and privacy safeguards that allow those tools to scale responsibly.
Data governance is where much of his current energy is concentrated. As an academic medical center, UCI Health faces a more complex governance landscape than most: the hospital, research enterprise, and medical school each have distinct data needs, access requirements, and compliance obligations. Research data, for instance, carries additional institutional review board and patient consent layers that don’t apply on the hospital operations side. And through its Epic partnership, the health system now has access to 300 million de-identified patient records globally for research purposes, a resource that requires its own governance framework to ensure appropriate use and access controls.
Rather than trying to govern everything at once, he’s taking a sequenced approach.
“Data governance is a very broad subject. It’s very tough for us to start all the components of the data management, data governance aspects of it. We need to focus on some of the critical ones that would benefit UC Irvine for the next three months, six months and one year,” he said. “Then we want to address all those specific components and create the policies, procedures and processes for data governance and then execute on it so we don’t boil the ocean.”
A significant part of that work is making data accessible and understandable to the people who need it. That means standing up a data catalog so users can discover what already exists before submitting new requests, clarifying role-based access policies, and establishing a transparent intake and prioritization process.
“How do we make sure that the user community — including the technical, nontechnical, and then the users — have a very transparent way to get the data and understand what they need to do,” Mr. Dharmarajan said.
For the analytics team itself, the post-expansion period is also an inflection point. Mr. Dharmarajan wants to reposition his team away from being ticket-driven report writers and toward functioning as business analytics consultants embedded in operational problem-solving. The near-term, measurable target is to reduce routine reporting requests — things like pulling patient lists with specific attributes — by 20% to 30% over the next six months through self-service analytics enablement. That reduction in transactional work would free the team to focus on more sophisticated analysis.
But the deeper transformation he’s driving is cultural. One of the most consistent pieces of feedback he hears from business leaders is the need for a “translation layer” between operations and analytics.
“The business talks plain English — I want to know about xyz. Then my team talks pure table and data structure, and there’s a big gap between these two,” he said. Hw do we, with this particular transformation, enable ourselves to learn the business-related functions? Then how do we make sure that we work with the application eam? Then we work with various other groups to understand what’s the mapping between the business plan and the analytics, or the technology?
He’s developing product manager and business analyst type roles specifically to bridge that gap, and hiring people who can hear an operational challenge, map it to the underlying data, and come back with a consulting-grade recommendation rather than just a report.
“Our team is very proud of the deep knowledge we have about the business. It’s a matter of connecting to the point to make sure we expose those skillsets outside and collaborate with our business,” he said. “Through the metrics we can track and monitor the number of tickets and we’ll be able to see the immediate impact of the road map. Then how are we going to transform it, and by transforming it, we are creating a business translation layer that will accelerate some of the business consulting roles.”
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