Photo caption: Representatives from PRHC took the stage at Microsoft Canada headquarters in Toronto, showcasing the hospital’s custom data analytics platform for 35 organizations in attendance.
By: Julie Raftis, Peterborough Regional Health Centre
Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) took the stage at Microsoft Canada headquarters in Toronto this fall to share a fundamental shift in how hospitals think, act, and decide in a resource-constrained world.
The centerpiece? Peregrine: a homegrown analytics platform built on Microsoft Fabric, now enabling realtime, predictive insights across clinical and operational domains. With it, PRHC is transforming how information flows, how decisions are made, and how care delivery evolves.
Attended by 148 people from 35 organizations, the “hackathon" event hosted by Microsoft shone a spotlight on PRHC's Information Technology and Data Analytics teams, who shared their knowledge and insights based on the hospital's experience developing and launching the platform earlier this year.
The Backstory: From Hurdles to Hope
PRHC's drive to build Peregrine started with a simple but urgent realization: the need for timely, accurate information is acute in health care, especially when resources are tight and demand is growing. Traditional systems – siloed, delayed, and disconnected – couldn't support the leap from reactive operations to proactive care.
Guided by the visionary leadership of Dr. Lynn Mikula, President and CEO and Evan Lyons, VP and Chief Information Officer (CIO), leaders and clinicians across PRHC made a strategic choice: to overcome that hurdle by treating data not as a byproduct, but as a strategic asset.
Along the way, they invested in new talent, leaned into technology, and took bold, calculated risks in unproven territory. There was no “big bang" moment. Success came from steady work, iteration, and alignment.
By the time they stood on the Microsoft Canada stage in front of their peers, Peregrine had already become one of PRHC's most in-demand initiatives, drawing attention from across the province.
What Is Peregrine, and Why it Matters
Peregrine is a custom-designed data analytics platform, built on Microsoft Fabric for secure, governed ingestion, transformation, and analysis. Its purpose: to deliver real-time, comprehensive data reporting and advanced analytics to inform decision-making at all levels.
Behind this technical description lies something deeper: a transformation of culture, trust, and possibility.
Here's how the system was built:
- Data ingestion from multiple sources: PRHC currently integrates 12 internal and external data sources – including APIs, SharePoint files, and other systems – into a governed, scalable system, with a number of additional data sources now in the testing phase. PRHC has also invested into building dynamic semantic models that provide the foundation for a sustainable, scalable, secure and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) program in future.
- Cleansing and validation: Removing invalid or irrelevant records to ensure analytic integrity.
- Medallion architecture: Layered storage and processing designed for scalable, governed, and “business-ready" data structures.
- Visualization and decision tools: Dashboards and interfaces built for clinicians, leaders, and analysts.
During their presentation, PRHC demonstrated some of these tools in action: an emergency department dashboard predicting flow and scheduling needs; a hospitalist turnaround-time tool; and a lab-utilization dashboard, among others.
Clinician-led, Trust-Fueled Success
One of the most compelling stories from PRHC's journey is how physicians and clinicians moved from skeptics to co-creators. Evan Lyons, Vice President and Chief Information Office at PRHC and one of the key drivers of the project, emphasized that the success metric they care most about is not a checklist of features – but the fact that clinicians have come forward with ideas, proof-of-concept dashboards, and new upstream questions.
“Peregrine wasn't built to check boxes, it was built to ask better questions than we ever could alone," said Evan Lyons, VP and CIO at PRHC. “Our goal was never just to do more – it was to do better. Less burnout. More compassion. Better outcomes. Data can help us get there."
This shift is not trivial in a system where decisions have long been driven by experience, instinct, or practice. PRHC's team deliberately resisted the temptation to have the tech side “dictate" solutions. Instead, they prioritized building trust, alignment, and coownership across the organization, and as a result:
- Resistance became acceptance; early dissenters turned into data champions.
- Some of the most avowed skeptics now say they feel more empowered than ever.
- Data no longer feels punitive – it supports decisions, stories, and solutions.
This cultural transformation, more than the technology alone, is what enables sustained success.
Scaling Beyond PRHC
PRHC's ambition isn't limited to its own walls. The hospital is actively exploring opportunities with its health care and service partners to extend the use of Peregrine within the region – a step toward enabling data interoperability. These relationships will continue to grow and evolve as the hospital expands its analytics program. In effect, PRHC is casting Peregrine as a regional nervous system – one that avoids duplicative infrastructure and instead shares insights, capacity, and learning.
The hospital is also supporting its peers across the province as they begin to develop their own platforms based on the deployment pattern used by PRHC. These collaborations support the hospital's five-year strategic plan, which prioritizes data and technology as pillars of clinical transformation.
Lessons for Health Systems: How to Begin
PRHC's journey offers a roadmap (with caveats) for other health care organizations:
- Start small, stay agile: Choose a domain where you can show tangible value (e.g. ED flow), then scale outward.
- Don't wait for perfection: Inaction carries its own cost. Strategic, incremental wins build momentum.
- Align leadership: Leaders must believe in the transformation and support the investment of time and resources.
- Foster clinician ownership: Inviting clinicians into design and iteration entrenches adoption and trust.
- Accept discomfort as part of progress: You will have wrong turns. The goal is to have more days right than wrong.
Ultimately, PRHC's message is not just about technology – it's about changing how hospitals think, decide, and evolve. At its core, this story is one of reinvention: about bending what seemed fixed – culture, decision-making, resource constraints – starting with curiosity, courage, and data.
As health systems everywhere wrestle with rising demand, constrained resources, and growing complexity, PRHC is offering more than a tool – they're demonstrating a path forward.
“We knew we couldn't meet the growing demands of our population without changing how we operate – data is how we close that gap," said Dr. Lynn Mikula, President and CEO at PRHC. “As we work toward establishing a Command Centre at PRHC – a hub where clinicians, leaders and other decision-makers will collaborate to ensure we are providing the best, most efficient care possible – the information we are able to access through Peregrine will be critical to everything we do."