Snowflake has unveiled a new data cloud service targeting the healthcare and life sciences space, making good the company’s stated strategy to increase its focus on specific industry verticals to maintain its rapid growth .
The new Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud, announced this week, will provide healthcare and life sciences solutions for partners and allow them to build their own solutions – both using interoperability and Snowflake platform data sharing capabilities.
Snowflake’s announcement cites the efforts of leading IT vendors, including Databricks and ServiceNow, to build on their core systems with applications and services for vertical markets – creating opportunities for partners in the old channel.
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The new Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud centers, integrates and exchanges high volumes of cross-cloud data on a scale while ensuring a high level of security and data management, said Todd Crosslin, healthcare and life sciences industry principal at Snowflake, in an interview with CRN.
The new service is expected to attract healthcare providers looking for ways to use healthcare data, including unstructured data such as clinical documents, DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) files. and radiology images, to improve health care delivery and patient outcomes and enhance clinical and operational. decision making.
Life science companies, including pharmaceutical companies, can use the service to combine and analyze healthcare and clinical trial data for drug development purposes.
“There’s tons and tons of unstructured data in our ecosystem,” said Crosslin, who has taught healthcare and life science companies and organizations where Snowflake already works with Anthem, IQVIA, Komodo Health, Novartis , Siemens Healthineers and Spectrum Health.
Snowflake sees industry verticals, including healthcare and life sciences, as key to helping the data cloud company maintain its rapid growth. In a call on second -quarter revenues in August 2021, CEO Frank Slootman said Snowflake was emphasizing the development of data services for clients in vertical industries such as financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, public sector, education, and advertising/ media/ Entertainment.
Snowflake is not alone in targeting the healthcare space. Data lakehouse platform developer Databricks launched its Databricks Lakehouse for Healthcare and Life Sciences on March 9, targeting data management, analytics and advanced AI use cases for disease prediction, medical image classification, biomarker detection and other activities, according to the company.
That announcement is the latest in Databricks ’own growing portfolio of industry -focused services, following the debut of Databricks Lakehouse for Retail in January and Databricks Lakehouse for Financial Services in February.
Beyond the data management arena, ServiceNow released a strategy in 2020 to develop workflow solutions at its core Now Platform for specific industries including telecommunications, banking and manufacturing.
In addition to tapping into the data sharing and collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake platform, Healthcare & Life Science Data Cloud uses the Snowpark developer framework used by developers, data engineers, and data scientists to create data applications and manage pipeline and machine learning workflows.
“It applies Snowflake’s workload capabilities to the healthcare and life sciences,” Crosslin said. “For our partners, it really takes advantage of Snowpark and developing solutions that are native to Snowflake. It’s a huge thing for our partners. ”
The new service supports industry data management and security requirements and standards, including HIPAA and HITRUST and GxP compatibility audits. It supports the OHDSI OMOP data and ecosystem model, according to Snowflake, and can process and run HL7/FHIR messages.
The solutions and services developed and delivered by the partners are a critical element of the Healthcare & Life Science Data Cloud, Crosslin says. This includes systems integrators and consulting service partners such as Cognizant, Deloitte, Infosys and NTT Data who are already developing solutions for their clients on the new platform.
ISVs and application developers also benefit from the new offer in the vendor’s Powered by Snowflake program including Health Catalyst, Strata and IQVIA software makers-including analytics-as-a-service applications-running Healthcare & Life Science Data Cloud.
The Healthcare & Life Science Data Cloud also enables third-party healthcare and life sciences data providers in the Snowflake Data Marketplace, including Compile, Equifax, Invitae and SameSky Health, to market data without the need of data copying and data movement. And Snowflake’s technology partners, including machine learning technology providers Dataiku and H2o.ai and data analytics tool supplier ThoughtSpot, are also working on the data provided by the new cloud service.
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