How NYC Health + Hospitals Uses Snowflake to Cut Data Delivery from Days to Minutes

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.