Why Open Source Analytics Is the Right Choice for Healthcare

Healthcare data is different. It's highly regulated, deeply sensitive, and critical to patient care. When you're building analytics for healthcare, your technology choices carry consequences that go far beyond typical BI decisions.

HIPAA compliance, patient privacy, audit requirements, budget constraints—and the risk of vendor lock-in when patient care depends on your infrastructure. Proprietary BI tools weren't built with these constraints in mind. Open source was.

You Can Audit What You Can't See

With proprietary software, you're trusting vendor claims about security. With open source, your security team can inspect every line of code.

Apache Superset™ is fully open source. Every function, every data access pattern, every security control—it's all visible. When vulnerabilities are discovered, the global community can verify fixes. You're not waiting for a vendor to prioritize your concern.

Healthcare security teams need to prove systems are secure. Being able to demonstrate exactly how data flows through your analytics platform—with auditable code—is invaluable during compliance reviews.

Your Data Stays Where You Need It

Healthcare data has strict residency requirements. Some data must stay on-premise. Some can't leave specific regions. Different organizations have different compliance needs.

Preset offers deployment flexibility proprietary vendors can't match:

• Preset Cloud (SaaS): Fully managed service with HIPAA compliance and BAA available. SOC 2 Type 2 certified. For organizations comfortable with cloud-based analytics.
• Managed Private Cloud (MPC): Preset manages dedicated infrastructure in your AWS, Azure, or GCP account. Your data never leaves your infrastructure. Additional security isolation with managed service benefits.
• Preset Certified Superset (PCS): Deploy on your own infrastructure—on-premise, private cloud, anywhere. Complete control with Preset support.

This flexibility exists because Superset is open source. Proprietary vendors lock you into their infrastructure. Open source lets you deploy where compliance actually dictates.

Multi-Tenancy for Healthcare's Complex Structure

Healthcare has intricate isolation needs:

• Hospital systems with multiple facilities
• Research groups that can't see each other's studies
• External partners needing specific data access
• Patient-facing analytics requiring per-patient isolation

Preset's workspace architecture provides true multi-tenant isolation. Each workspace is completely segregated—separate data, users, and access controls.

Critical for:

• Embedded analytics: Patient portals where each user sees only their data
• Research collaborations: Multi-site studies with site-level isolation
• Departmental boundaries: Finance, clinical ops, and research with different compliance needs

Learn about workspaces.

Price Assurance When Budgets Are Tight

Healthcare budgets are under constant pressure. You can't afford BI tools that punish success with unpredictable pricing.

Open source eliminates vendor pricing risk. With Preset: $20 per user per month. No platform fees. No surprise charges. No capacity fees when analytics prove valuable.

Compare to proprietary tools with $100–575/month base fees before per-user costs, then capacity charges that spike when you scale.

Healthcare organizations planning 3–5 year analytics investments need cost predictability. Open source delivers it. Read more on pricing assurance.

No Vendor Lock-In When Stakes Are High

What happens when your BI vendor raises prices 300%? Gets acquired? Deprecates features? Goes out of business?

With proprietary software, you're rebuilding from scratch. With open source, you have options.

Apache Superset is governed by the Apache Software Foundation—vendor-neutral, community-driven. If you ever need to leave Preset's managed service, you can deploy Superset yourself. Your dashboards, semantic layer, investment—it all comes with you.

Healthcare systems make 10–20 year technology bets. Open source ensures your analytics investment survives EMR transitions, regulatory changes, and organizational restructuring.

Built for Healthcare Use Cases

Real-Time Patient Monitoring: ED dashboards, ICU tracking, bed capacity—Superset connects to real-time sources (Druid, ClickHouse) with auto-refresh dashboards.

Population Health Analytics: Analyze cohorts across millions of patients using Superset's dataset-centric design. Define populations as datasets ("Diabetic patients 65+, HbA1c > 8"), then slice and dice without rewriting queries. Read about dataset-centric architecture.

Clinical Research: SQL Lab gives researchers a full IDE for complex analysis. Non-technical coordinators use the no-code Explore view. One tool, multiple skill levels.

Regulatory Reporting: CMS quality measures, readmission rates—define metrics once in your transformation layer (dbt, Airflow). Every dashboard uses the same logic. When definitions change, update once and every chart updates automatically.

Healthcare Data Architecture Done Right

EHR/Source Systems → Data Pipeline → Healthcare Data Warehouse → Superset

Your HL7, FHIR, claims, and clinical data get parsed and normalized in the pipeline. De-identification and masking happen here. Data reaches your warehouse clean and structured.

Superset connects via standard SQL. This means:

• No vendor lock-in: Your warehouse isn't tied to your BI tool
• Best-practice governance: Sensitive transformations happen in auditable pipelines, not hidden in BI tools
• Flexibility: New data sources? Pipeline handles it. BI layer just connects.

Security and Compliance Built In

• Audit logs: Track who accessed what data and when (HIPAA requirement)
• Row-Level Security: Providers see only their patients. Researchers see only their studies.
• Encryption: TLS 1.3+ in transit, AES-256 at rest
• SOC 2 Type 2 certified: Preset Cloud meets rigorous security standards
• HIPAA BAA available: For Preset's managed services

For additional compliance requirements, MPC or PCS gives you flexibility for custom security controls with Preset's support.

Real Healthcare Organizations Choose Preset

Large healthcare analytics platforms use Preset for:

• Multi-tenant isolation for customer-facing embedded analytics
• Deployment flexibility to meet varying compliance requirements
• Price predictability scaling to thousands of users
• Open source assurance against vendor lock-in

They embedded Preset in their healthcare application, giving each hospital system isolated workspaces. The architecture scaled from their first customer to hundreds without surprise costs or limitations.

The Choice

Healthcare deserves better than proprietary BI tools that weren't designed for your constraints.

Open source offers transparency, flexibility, control, and capability. Preset delivers open source benefits with enterprise support, managed infrastructure, and healthcare-specific deployment options.

Whether you need analytics for clinical operations, population health, research, or patient-facing applications—the architecture should support your mission, not constrain it.

Try Preset free—no credit card required. Free for 5 users, forever. Talk to our team to learn more.