{"slug":"improving-decision-making-to-save-lives-faster","url":"https://findausecase.com/use-cases/improving-decision-making-to-save-lives-faster","title":"Improving decision-making to save lives faster","description":"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.","company":"Powys Teaching Health Board","industry":"Healthcare","country":"United Kingdom","aiCapabilities":["Predictive Analytics","Code Generation"],"businessFunctions":["Human Resources"],"technology":["Databricks Data + AI Platform","Unity Catalog","Power BI","Power Apps","Databricks Assistant"],"deployment":"Hybrid","problemStatement":"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.","solutionApproach":"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.","businessValue":"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.","evidence":{"band":"high"},"sourceUrl":"https://www.databricks.com/customers/pthb","dates":{"publishedAt":"2026-09-28T05:45:47.585Z","publishedAtSource":"pipeline","updatedAt":"2026-09-28T05:45:47.585Z"},"license":"Open for reading and citing with a link to https://findausecase.com/use-cases/improving-decision-making-to-save-lives-faster. Bulk republication requires permission."}