National health service organization: Modernizing analytics in the private cloud to dramatically improve customer experience

Challenge

With over 328 million people in the United States, health service organizations are challenged with managing secure data, communicating key analytic insights, and supporting a growing number of customers across health plans, patient enrollment, claims and payments. The amount of data that needs to be analyzed and leveraged across these organizations is increasing year over year. 

This large national health service organization had a vision to better serve their customers by deploying predictive analytics instead of the currently utilized descriptive analytical approaches. They aimed to achieve this innovation by deploying a big data platform.  Traditional, rearward looking descriptive analytics have a longer time to insights in contrast to data-driven predictive and prescriptive ones.  Removing IT barriers which separated business users from insights, creating a data lake and supporting business requests directly were challenges the organization was looking to address. Furthermore, upgrades for an organization of this size are often a time intensive and tedious process fraught with risk.  The organization needed a way to securely manage customer data and analytics in a private cloud environment.

Solution

The national health service organization currently leverages Cloudera’s enterprise platform, managing over 1,000 production nodes, across over 140 use cases including offloading heavy data transformations from Teradata for much more efficient processing. Additional use cases managed include: corporate data warehouse, data science for predictive insurability, critical dashboards for business leaders, product development analytics, and real-time streaming.  Over 6,000 business users leverage Impala for SQL query processing both directly and via 3rd party BI tools.

Moving to Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Private Cloud was essential to improving their customers’ experiences. New capabilities contributing to this decision: 1) individual analytics and workloads can be upgraded independently, simplifying the process, 2) reducing and balancing innovation needs for users - frequency and stability, and 3) having the ability to spin up and down ephemeral workloads as needed, allowing far greater resource efficiency of the infrastructure. Finally, complete tenant isolation ensures predictable performance and guaranteed meeting company SLAs.

Driving expansion is the next phase for the company.  Their vision is separating storage and compute in their own data center to be able to analyze data in real-time.  To enrich their data, sort through it, and query it interactively was another big driver to move to CDP.  

The organization is also planning to leverage NiFi to replace Flume for the ingestion mechanism to collect, aggregate, and transport large amounts of streaming data.   Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) will be used as the standard tool for data science across the organization.

Results (+ Futures)

While the organization is currently early in their journey to CDP, they are already seeing value in being able to upgrade components independently without having outages across the entire environment. This is a big advantage for large health service organizations.  

Modernizing and future-proofing their platform with CDP Private Cloud is the first step to creating a path to cloud-native analytic services, enabling public-cloud-like agility and flexibility as well as interoperability for a hybrid cloud. Lastly, providing self-service access will accelerate time to value for new use cases with minimal operational impact on the organization.