Transforming Health Outcomes: Agentic Clinical Decision Making with Cloudera & ServiceNow

Healthcare providers are under market, competitive, and regulatory pressure to transform. From a market perspective, while patient centricity has been an ongoing initiative for nearly two decades, it’s table stakes in 2026. Big technology firms in other industries are setting the bar for personalization, customization, and continuity of communications and service, and patients expect those same capabilities from their healthcare providers. Competitors, such as retail clinics, telehealth companies, and “payviders” are beginning to meet those expectations, providing digital healthcare solutions and convenience of care that traditional providers struggle to match. And finally, regulations around healthcare and data privacy provide both penalties and incentives for providers who can improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care.

Establishing the longitudinal patient record, where each interaction with a patient is a part of a continuum of care instead of a series of one-offs, is central to healthcare transformation, including population health and patient centricity. But patient data is often scattered across clinical, financial, and operational systems, and it’s difficult to access, unify, and analyze all of that data efficiently.

This blog describes how Cloudera and ServiceNow deliver a longitudinal patient record and leverage agentic AI to uncover patient insights faster than ever and improve patient outcomes.

The Barriers to Establishing a Longitudinal Patient Record

The longitudinal patient record has the potential to address many of the industry’s challenges: providing a seamless experience for patients, improving outcomes, and lowering the cost of care. But the reality of healthcare data environments, the highly regulated nature of the industry, and the limitations of machine learning have traditionally held industry transformation back. To establish the longitudinal patient record, healthcare providers must overcome:

Fragmented data: Patient data is often scattered across multiple clinical, operational, and financial systems with little to no interoperability standards. While interoperability is a major initiative, with HL7 being the standard for healthcare data across EHRs and other critical systems, many systems still don’t talk to each other today, especially across different provider environments, making it extremely difficult to capture every patient interaction.

Regulatory Requirements: Regulations like the United States’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandate how Protected Health Information (PHI) can be collected, stored, distributed, and shared, and make connecting the dots across patient interactions difficult. In an increasingly decentralized healthcare ecosystem, where patients may have a Primary Care Physician (PCP) and also visit emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, retail health clinics, and telehealth firms, secure and governed data sharing is critical for establishing a continuum of care.

Limitations of Traditional Machine Learning: Machine learning (ML) is sufficient for some clinical use cases, such as remote patient monitoring and reducing readmissions, where clinicians rely on a model to flag a patient’s condition based on pattern recognition. However, many clinical use cases require models to go a step farther, applying context and reasoning across vast sets of patient and research data to arrive at a decision.

Challenges with AI Activation: Even when healthcare providers successfully deploy AI models, those insights often remain disconnected from clinical workflows. Integration requires either replicating PHI to enable automation, which introduces risk, or maintaining compliance by forcing care teams to manually transcribe AI insights. 

Enabling Clinical Decision Support with Cloudera & ServiceNow

Cloudera and ServiceNow provide the capabilities needed for healthcare providers to build a longitudinal patient record and leverage agentic AI to connect the dots across the continuum of care, supporting faster diagnoses, flagging and mitigating potential complications, and coordinating care and post-care follow-up across departments and channels.

Here is how it works:

Cloudera manages patient data at scale. Cloudera’s open data lakehouse architecture supports the real- time ingestion, processing, and analysis of data from clinical, operational, and financial systems, as well as third-party research databases and other sources that are critical for establishing a longitudinal patient record and giving AI the context to make accurate, consistent decisions. The open data lakehouse architecture can be deployed anywhere your data lives, with zero-copy, federated access to that data for analytics and AI.

Bring AI to the data. Traditional AI solutions require moving data to the cloud, introducing regulatory risks and a costly data movement tax. Cloudera enables providers to build, train, and deploy AI models entirely within their secure environment, ensuring full data governance without replicating PHI. By pairing this secure foundation with ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric, organizations can utilize zero-copy access to query localized insights in real time. This capability autonomously triggers compliant care workflows, like flagging high-risk patient conditions, without sensitive data ever leaving the environment.

Agentic clinical decision support. Cloudera and ServiceNow bridge the gap between patient insight and clinical action. When Cloudera’s models identify a high-risk patient, ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric uses zero-copy access to securely query the clinical context. Instead of making autonomous medical decisions, ServiceNow automatically orchestrates the next steps, ensuring PHI never leaves Cloudera’s compliant environment.

Security and Governance. Cloudera’s unified data fabric provides end-to-end governance, security, and lineage, so agents are trained on and given context with a foundation of trusted data. Moreover, every decision made by a ServiceNow AI agent can be traced back to the underlying data for auditability of the full data and AI lifecycle. With a unified data fabric, clinicians can trust AI and the decisions AI makes.

By leveraging the longitudinal patient record, enabling security and governance across the entire data and AI lifecycle, and deploying AI agents who can accelerate and enhance patient care, healthcare providers can improve outcomes and reduce the cost of care.

The Value of Clinical Decision Support

Agentic clinical decision support has the potential to transform patient care and address the most pressing challenges of the industry. By combining Cloudera’s ability to deliver a secure and governed longitudinal patient record with ServiceNow’s agentic workflow automation, healthcare providers can realize several benefits:

• Improved outcomes. AI agents can process complex patient profiles, population health data, and third-party research databases to uncover connections that human researchers might miss entirely, all in a matter of seconds. They can identify potential complications, coordinate care across departments and providers, and ultimately improve the patient experience and reduce risk.

• Reduced costs. By accelerating diagnoses, patients receive the right care more quickly and consume fewer provider resources. By proactively identifying and mitigating potential risks and complications, providers can significantly reduce readmissions, avoiding regulatory fines and additional operational costs. 

• Operational Efficiency. By removing the research burden and providing decision support, AI agents give doctors more time to spend with their patients, reducing burnout and improving job and care quality.

Ready to Operationalize Agentic Clinical Decision Support? 

Healthcare providers have been struggling to modernize the patient experience for nearly two decades, and the pressure to deliver has never been higher. Agentic AI has the potential to transform the healthcare industry. By establishing a longitudinal patient record and providing secure, governed access to that record for agentic workflows, Cloudera and ServiceNow give providers the ability to both accelerate and enhance the patient experience, while reducing the cost of care.

To learn more about the partnership, read the Omdia Whitepaper, “Workflow Data Fabric: Powering Private AI Agents and Real-Time Intelligence with Cloudera and ServiceNow.”