Improving decision-making to save lives faster
Powys Teaching Health Board (PTHB), which plans NHS services for a quarter of Wales, migrated from a strained on-premises SQL warehouse to the Databricks Data + AI Platform to unify patient, workforce and partner-organization data within a year. The federated lakehouse cut time to build data pipelines by 40%, and staff using the AI-powered Databricks Assistant became 65% more productive answering data questions, while the board is now exploring predictive use cases such as forecasting feature utilization.
Overview
Powys Teaching Health Board (PTHB), which plans NHS services for a quarter of Wales, migrated from a strained on-premises SQL warehouse to the Databricks Data + AI Platform to unify patient, workforce and partner-organization data within a year. The federated lakehouse cut time to build data pipelines by 40%, and staff using the AI-powered Databricks Assistant became 65% more productive answering data questions, while the board is now exploring predictive use cases such as forecasting feature utilization.
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Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
Roughly 50% of the data PTHB needed to inform patient-centric decisions came from neighboring organizations in varying formats, slowing their ability to connect data with patient care quality. Their on-premises SQL warehouse could not cope with the scale of a growing data estate, developing data access and ingestion bottlenecks that wasted time and directly impacted patient care; modernizing the tech stack with their own processes was estimated to take five to 10 years.
The solution
PTHB adopted the Databricks Data + AI Platform on Azure to house all new incoming data, including data from low-code apps such as Power Apps. Unity Catalog centralized security and governance at the Databricks layer, and Lakehouse Federation let them seamlessly connect their on-premises SQL warehouse and remote BigQuery environment at NHS Wales into a single federated view. Power BI dashboards made it easy to derive actionable insights, and Databricks Assistant, an AI-powered tool, accelerated training for traditional SQL staff to embrace new programming languages.
Reported business value
PTHB modernized its data infrastructure in under a year, far faster than the estimated five to 10 years, achieving a 40% decrease in time to build data pipelines for analytics and spending an estimated 65% less time answering questions from business data users thanks to Databricks Assistant. HR now self-serves rostering, resource management and scheduling data, and PTHB is beginning to explore predictive use cases like forecasting feature utilization.
Sources
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