For years, healthcare innovation has focused on technology like EHRs, analytics, CRMs, and AI. Yet the single element that now determines whether any of those investments succeed is something more fundamental: identity.
In a world awash with data, the true bottleneck isn’t how much we collect, it’s whether we can trust it. Every care interaction, digital engagement, and analytics initiative depends on confidently knowing the whole person.
Identity has quietly become the new infrastructure of healthcare. Without it, even the most advanced data strategy is built on a shaky foundation.
The architecture beneath every modern experience
Many healthcare organizations talk about “Customer 360” as if it’s a dashboard or data warehouse project. But that’s only the surface. Beneath every seamless digital experience sits an invisible layer of identity management—one that determines whether systems recognize the same individual across appointments, apps, or billing systems.
“I don’t know how you do value-based care at risk without having clean data around that patient… I cannot imagine doing it without this.”
Todd Crosslin, Global Industry Principal for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Snowflake
When that layer is missing, everything downstream breaks. Records duplicate. Communications misfire. Analytics mislead. A patient who updates their address in one system still receives mail at the old one. A clinician sees an incomplete record. A marketer misidentifies the same person as two different consumers.
As a result, one of the most valuable assets is at risk: trust.
Why identity now defines infrastructure
Three industry forces are converging to make identity the new backbone of healthcare systems:
- Data fragmentation is accelerating.
Health systems now manage dozens of cloud platforms, digital front doors, and joint ventures, all generating partial views of the same person. Without a unifying identity layer, those fragments never reconcile.
- AI has raised the cost of inaccuracy.
Predictive and generative models amplify any inconsistency in the data beneath them. Todd Crosslin, Global Industry Principal for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Snowflake, put it during a recent webinar with Baylor Scott & White and Verato, AI is only as good as the foundation beneath it.
- Experience is now a competitive differentiator.
Patients now make choices the same way consumers do—based on convenience and personalization. Health systems that deliver seamless, consistent interactions across every channel build loyalty and improve engagement. That consistency is only possible when identity connects the ecosystem, so that every encounter, from scheduling to billing to outreach, recognizes the same person in the same way.
“Not only a good experience but a consistent experience… Our goal is to make sure that anyone that sees the Baylor Scott & White logo has a consistent experience across all our different sites.”
Cody Campbell, Director of Information Services and Operations – Revenue Services, Baylor Scott & White
Identity, in short, is no longer an IT function. It’s a shared foundation that powers personalization, analytics, compliance, and growth.
A glimpse of what’s possible
Baylor Scott & White’s journey shows what happens when identity becomes that foundation. Facing the challenge of unifying more than 16 million patient and 30 million consumer records, the organization rebuilt its data architecture to ensure every interaction begins with a single, trusted identity.
As Varma Gottumukkala, Director of Data Platforms at Baylor Scott & White, described it, the goal was to “create that comprehensive and unified view of a customer by bringing all the data we have together so we can tell their story with us.”
That vision shifts Customer 360 from a data management goal to an organizational operating model. When identity is accurate and connected, every system—from Epic to Snowflake to digital engagement platforms—can work as one.
Building the identity-first data layer
At Verato, we believe identity is the first data problem to solve—the prerequisite for every other strategic initiative, from cloud migration to AI readiness. Our work with innovators like Baylor Scott & White and Snowflake demonstrates how an identity-first data layer allows organizations to:
- Establish a single source of truth for every person, provider, and household
- Eliminate duplicate and conflicting records before they reach analytic systems
- Confidently activate trusted data across Snowflake’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud and other enterprise platforms
When identity becomes infrastructure, everything built on top of it, from analytics to digital engagement and AI, becomes stronger, faster, and more accurate.
The takeaway
Healthcare’s next breakthroughs won’t come from more data. They’ll come from trustworthy identity—the quiet infrastructure that lets every technology know exactly who it’s serving.
Customer 360 isn’t just a vision anymore. It’s the natural outcome of getting identity right. And the organizations that recognize identity as their core infrastructure will lead the next era of connected, personalized care.
To see how leading innovators are already doing this, watch the Baylor Scott & White, Snowflake, and Verato webinar on building a scalable Customer 360 to deliver personalized, connected care.
