How NYC Health + Hospitals Uses Snowflake to Cut Data Delivery from Days to Minutes
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest municipal health system in the United States, serving over 1.4 million New Yorkers at more than 70 care locations. The system deployed Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud as the foundation of its data hub, centralizing more than 100 billion rows of healthcare data to surface faster patient insights. A rearchitected data ingestion pipeline now delivers health plan membership data to stakeholders in five minutes—down from five days.
Impact
5 days → 5 minutes
Data delivery time for membership and claims data
100B+
Rows of healthcare data centralized in Snowflake
Challenge
Fragmented data pipelines forced NYC Health + Hospitals to wait up to five days to deliver updated health plan membership data to internal teams and external partners, limiting the ability of care coordinators and clinical staff to act quickly for patients with complex, chronic conditions.
Solution
The organization rebuilt its data architecture on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, automating payer data ingestion into a centralized hub and using Snowflake Secure Data Sharing for partner collaboration, Snowflake Horizon Catalog for governance, and Snowflake Cortex AI for generative AI experimentation.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“With Snowflake, our end-to-end data delivery time for membership and claims data has improved from five days to five minutes. That’s a massive gain in performance.”
“As we begin our generative AI journey, it’s critical that we focus on strategic initiatives that can deliver better healthcare and lower cost of operations while also accomplishing the foundational goals of providing more high-quality data, dashboards and reporting.”
“We’re building out communities of practice to let people experiment with gen AI technology using Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake Copilot. We want to make sure that we can ask questions of our data because that’s when you really unlock the potential of the data in an enterprise—and Snowflake is helping us do that.”
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Full Story
As the nation’s largest municipal health system, NYC Health + Hospitals carries an outsized responsibility: delivering care to New York City’s most vulnerable residents, including those experiencing homelessness, which has reached its highest level since the Great Depression. Providing timely, accurate clinical and administrative data across 70-plus patient care locations, dozens of payers, and multiple city agencies is not merely an operational challenge—it is a direct determinant of patient outcomes.
Before building its modern data hub, the organization relied on fragmented pipelines and manual processes to move protected health information (PHI) among internal teams and external partners. Membership and claims data from payers could take up to five days to reach the teams that needed it—managed care, population health, and finance—creating a significant lag between real-world events and actionable intelligence. That gap was particularly costly when care coordinators needed to intervene quickly for patients with complex, chronic conditions.
NYC Health + Hospitals selected Snowflake as the engine for its data hub, capitalizing on capabilities already in place within the organization. The team rearchitected data ingestion from multiple payers, including MetroPlusHealth, building an automated pipeline that streams membership data directly into Snowflake. Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enables the organization to collaborate with external partners and city agencies without physically moving data, while Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s role-based access controls and governance tooling enforce compliance in a highly regulated environment. Looking ahead, staff are experimenting with Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake Copilot to query data through natural language and identify high-priority generative AI use cases.
The most tangible result of the transformation is a 99-percent compression in data delivery time: end-to-end turnaround for membership and claims data dropped from five days to five minutes. Automated alerts now notify users the moment new data arrives, replacing manual handoffs and ensuring that every department—from managed care to finance—receives the same refreshed data set simultaneously.
NYC Health + Hospitals has formed an enterprise AI advisory board to guide responsible AI adoption across three priorities: strategic investment in high-impact use cases, ethical and safe implementation, and a clear definition of ROI for a public health system. With more than 100 billion rows of data in Snowflake and dozens of high-priority AI use cases identified, the organization is positioned to move from analytics efficiency to measurable improvements in patient care for all New Yorkers.
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