Cloudera, the only company bringing AI to data anywhere, released healthcare findings from its latest research report, The Data Readiness Index 2026. The report reveals that healthcare organizations face significant barriers to scaling AI due to persistent gaps in data access, governance, and infrastructure performance.
As healthcare organizations pursue digital transformation, they are managing rapidly growing volumes of clinical, operational, and patient-generated data across increasingly distributed environments. AI is becoming essential for improving patient outcomes, reducing the cost of care, streamlining administrative workflows, and patient centricity. However, many organizations still lack the governed data foundation required to operationalize AI at scale.
Although 87% of healthcare respondents report having visibility into where their data resides, organizations continue to face difficulties integrating, governing, and operationalizing trusted data at scale. In fact, 28% of healthcare organizations say infrastructure performance consistently hinders operational initiatives, and the research also revealed broader challenges around governance and operationalizing AI across distributed environments.
Despite these challenges, healthcare organizations continue investing aggressively in AI readiness and modernization. Success increasingly depends on the ability to bring AI to data wherever it resides, enabling organizations to generate insights across distributed environments while maintaining the security, governance, and compliance healthcare demands.
“Healthcare organizations are managing enormous volumes of highly sensitive and distributed patient and operational data, yet many still struggle to operationalize AI consistently across environments,” said Rameez Chatni, Global Director of AI Solutions - Healthcare and Life Sciences at Cloudera. “Moving large amounts of regulated healthcare data into a single public cloud environment is often impractical, costly, and difficult to govern. To scale AI successfully, healthcare providers need the flexibility to bring AI to governed data wherever it lives, across data centers, clouds, and edge environments.”
To learn more about The Data Readiness Index 2026 and how healthcare organizations can scale trusted AI across hybrid environments, visit Cloudera.com.
