Snowflake launches data cloud for healthcare and life sciences Leave a comment
Bozeman, Montana-headquartered data company Snowflake has expanded its “data cloud” ecosystem with the launch of a dedicated offering for healthcare and life sciences industries.
Officially dubbed Healthcare & Life Sciences (HCLS) Data Cloud, the product aims to provide enterprises in these sectors with a single cross-cloud data platform to centralize, integrate and exchange critical and sensitive data at scale. It is tailor-made to solve key challenges that keep healthcare enterprises from leveraging data for innovation and continues to be backed by various technology, data, application and consulting partners, including Equifax, Dataiku, H20.ai, Cognizant, Deloitte and Strata.
Need for HCLS Data Cloud
For most healthcare or life sciences companies, the task of leveraging data for medical innovation can be described as one associated with regulatory and technical hurdles. The firms often rely on legacy architectures (that keep data in fragmented siloes) and have to follow stringent compliance rules, with no common models for data sharing with the industry. This makes downstream use difficult, affecting advanced analytics and AI projects, including those for patient care and optimizing clinical and operational decision-making.
Snowflake’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud solves these challenges by providing an agile and interoperable solution that facilitates the storage, sharing, and use of data. It eliminates technical and institutional silos while ensuring the security, governance and compliance required to meet industry regulations. In all, Snowflake’s data cloud ecosystem facilitates six key workloads — capabilities of a data warehouse, data lake, data engineering, data sharing, data science and data app development.
“The Snowflake Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud will unlock the next generation of innovation in the industry by enabling organizations to take advantage of borderless data access while ensuring strict data governance, security, and privacy compliance,” Todd Crosslin, Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry Principal at Snowflake, said. “The entire industry can benefit from this live, connected ecosystem to get access to the data they need when it’s needed.”
The solution is already in use by various organizations, including Anthem, IQVIA, Komodo Health, Siemens Healthineers, Spectrum Health, Novartis and Roche.
Snowflake’s competition
The launch of Snowflake’s HCLS Data Cloud comes just a week after Databricks’ launch of lakehouse for healthcare and life sciences. The two companies are set out for the same goal – to be the one-stop shop for all things enterprise data.
In fact, both Snowflake and Databricks, led by Ali Ghodsi, have been expanding their product ecosystem to cover more verticals and use cases. The former recently announced the acquisition of Streamlit to simplify data app development, while the latter has debuted lakehouse for retail and financial services, as well as a solution to integrate partner data tools with ease.
