As a trusted partner for healthcare organizations around the world, HealthVerity synchronizes transformational technologies with the nation's largest healthcare and consumer data ecosystem, allowing their clients to harness the power of data for better decision-making and improved patient outcomes. At its core, the HealthVerity mission is to revolutionize the way healthcare data is accessed, exchanged, and leveraged. Their comprehensive and secure platform acts as a centralized hub, facilitating seamless privacy-protected data exchange. By enabling healthcare organizations to access and analyze vast amounts of data from diverse sources, HealthVerity empowers 80% of the top 20 U.S. pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as insurance  and government agencies, including CDC and FDA, to gain deep insights, drive operational efficiencies, and uncover new opportunities for innovation.

Data privacy in healthcare is critical

Like most industries today, healthcare is experiencing an era of explosive data growth. This data is coming from an ever-increasing number of sources such as clinical trials, electronic health records, claims databases, wearable devices, and other IoT endpoints. It also includes data generated during routine patient care, observational studies, patient-reported outcomes, and other sources that reflect real-world patient engagement such as medical imaging, lab work, genetic sequencing – the list goes on. And HealthVerity works to provide as much of this data as possible to their clients, and they take the stewardship of this data very seriously. 

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Safeguarding this data is one of their highest priorities as an organization. The handling of identifiable information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI), requires the highest levels of protection to ensure compliance with privacy regulations such as HIPAA. Which is why HealthVerity leverages advanced techniques such as clean rooms. Clean rooms are secure environments where sensitive data can be isolated, processed, and analyzed while maintaining strict privacy and compliance controls. They’re designed to allow users such as data practitioners to work with de-identified or anonymized data without the risk of re-identification.

Streamlining HealthVerity’s data management with Prophecy and Databricks

An issue for the HealthVerity data engineering team and their stakeholders was how best to establish a unified data architecture that could effectively handle the management of their ever growing data footprint in the most secure and compliant way possible. Their existing data architecture was complex, rigid, and required highly skilled resources in the form of data engineers, cloud experts, and enterprise architects to effectively establish a secure work environment where sensitive data operations could be run without data being exposed. Work in this area had been inefficient and did not measure up to organizational performance goals. Finally, HealthVerity needed a data engineering solution that prioritized automation, code standardization, and reusability. They could not afford to spend weeks building solutions to pre-process and transform supplied data only to have a major privacy issue arise that needs to be addressed by already strained data engineering resources.

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Databricks and Prophecy emerged as the ideal solution for HealthVerity's needs due to the combination of powerful capabilities in handling large and diverse datasets and end-to-end data engineering enablement. With the Databricks unified data platform, HealthVerity can seamlessly integrate and manage the diverse sources from their data suppliers, and its scalable infrastructure and collaborative environment support the efficiency needs of HealthVerity data operations. Databricks' security and privacy features, including the Databricks Unity Catalog, delivers automated data governance and lets the data team easily manage their data assets while ensuring security and compliance with industry regulations such as HIPAA. 

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Additionally, after an exhaustive analysis of low-code and no-code data engineering solutions that could automate and reduce their overall development burden, the data team determined that Prophecy was the ideal solution for their use cases. Prophecy was able to seamlessly integrate with both Databricks as well as the complex HealthVerity IT infrastructure. It also provided a visual design interface to build high quality data pipelines without advanced engineering experience, which eliminated an over reliance on limited and expensive data engineering resources by enabling their entire data team with data engineering expertise. From a privacy protection standpoint, Prophecy’s analytics workflows ensure no leakage of PII/PHI data, protecting patient privacy and preventing sensitive information from being exposed.

Finally, Prophecy empowers their entire data team with greater collaboration opportunities by providing a unified platform that allows team members to collaborate, share insights, and collectively work on data transformations, fostering a more efficient and productive environment.

How Prophecy has paid off for HealthVerity

Since implementing Prophecy, HealthVerity has been able to reap massive benefits across multiple areas, showcasing the value and impact of the platform. Prophecy has played a crucial role in ensuring compliance with data privacy requirements, allowing HealthVerity to confidently handle sensitive data while maintaining rigorous privacy standards. Additionally, the Prophecy has opened greater collaboration opportunities within clean rooms, enabling HealthVerity data teams to work together seamlessly and efficiently in isolating and managing sensitive data. One of the most notable benefits is the accelerated development of data pipelines. With Prophecy's visual, low-code tooling for data pipeline development, HealthVerity has witnessed an impressive 12x improvement in their development process. What previously took 12 weeks can now be accomplished in just 1 week, streamlining data pipeline development and enabling faster data processing and analysis.

Furthermore, Prophecy has truly democratized data engineering at HealthVerity, allowing less technical users to undertake complex data engineering tasks with ease. This has resulted in a remarkable 5x increase in productivity, reducing the time required to safely map data to a client from 10 weeks down to 2 weeks. This has not only enhanced productivity but also contributed to delivering timely and accurate insights to their clients.

HealthVerity now represents over 330 million de-identified patients in the United States – and growing. Leveraging Prophecy's data engineering platform with the Databricks Lakehouse and Unity Catalog, they are empowering their clients to drive meaningful improvements in patient outcomes by synchronizing unparalleled privacy compliance and governance.

Attending Databricks Data and AI Summit? Come see our customer-led session with HealthVerity and learn how they are using low-code data engineering in conjunction with Unity Catalog to ensure data privacy and integrity.

Get more session details here!