Healthee Builds AI-Powered Health Insurance Navigation For Over 1 Million American Families with Snowflake
Migrating to Snowflake Cortex AI in just two weeks, Healthee empowers more than half of its employees with data and develops new AI features up to 5x faster.
2Weeks to migrate to Snowflake from legacy infrastructure
~5xFaster development of new features
Industry
TechnologyLocation
New York, North AmericaSimplifying health insurance for employees across the US
Understanding healthcare insurance should be easy. But when employees have questions about their benefits, deductibles or the cost of essential healthcare services, they have to look through hundreds of pages of policy documentation for answers. Healthee aims to solve this problem for good by collecting and centralizing health insurance data from across a wide array of policies in a single, easy-to-use and AI-powered platform.
Since 2021, the company has partnered with over 15,000 organizations across the U.S. to offer employees smarter ways to explore their insurance policies and associated benefits, ensuring people get the right level of cover for themselves and their families, and seek preventive care and medical attention when they need it most. But surfacing these insights in a way that’s intuitive and easy to understand demands extensive data.
Much of this data lives in unstructured policy documents and contracts, and unlocking it at scale is what separates a good benefits platform from a transformative one. To keep delivering the depth of insight that helps employers optimize benefits spend, HR teams manage utilization and employees actually understand their coverage, Healthee needed infrastructure purpose-built for AI.
To extract accurate, actionable insights from unstructured U.S. health insurance data and deliver the best solution possible, Healthee migrated its data and AI ecosystem to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. Now, the company uses Cortex AI to accelerate the development of internal and customer-facing chatbots, democratize data access across all Healthee business units, and create a better healthcare insurance experience for over one million households in the United States.
Story highlights
Democratizing data access to build a better product: From R&D and product management, to customer success, sales and operations teams, Cortex AI gives over half of Healthee’s team direct access to data-driven insights without engineering support.
Accelerating new AI feature development by up to 5x: By rapidly building agentic loops with Cortex AI, Healthee can ship new features faster for its internal chatbot, Healthee 360, compared to manual development, freeing engineers to focus on higher-value work.
Migrating to Snowflake in two weeks: Thanks to AI development tools and Snowflake’s intuitive platform, Healthee avoided significant cost and disruption by migrating from its legacy infrastructure to the AI Data Cloud in just two weeks.
Building the foundation for AI-driven product development
For several years, Healthee’s legacy data infrastructure supported its product and data needs. However, Ofir Hasbani, Engineering Group Manager at Healthee, saw that it would take significant engineering effort to build out the new AI and data tools Healthee would need in the near future. To maintain Healthee’s position as the most intuitive benefits navigation platform in the market, and keep accelerating the AI capabilities that define it, the team knew it needed to move fast and continue innovating.
“Our previous infrastructure served us well in our early years, but as Healthee scaled and AI became central to our roadmap, we needed a platform that was built for that next chapter,” recalls Hasbani. “I saw a demo of Cortex AI at an event and it was love at first sight. The way its AI agents could work on top of data was unlike anything I’d seen before. I could understand why my engineers kept advocating for Snowflake.”
To keep up with a rapidly changing industry and continue meeting customer expectations, Healthee, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), made the choice to deploy Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and begin incorporating Cortex AI to build out Healthee’s AI capabilities.
I was really surprised by how quickly Snowflake delivered value for us. It’s a complete platform, and it gives us access to all the data tools we need immediately.
Ofir Hasbani
Engineering Group Manager, Healthee
Bringing vital, AI-powered insights to all teams at Healthee
Thanks to Snowflake’s familiar, intuitive data logic, Hasbani and his team migrated to the AI Data Cloud in just two weeks.
Since moving to the AI Data Cloud, Healthee stores and processes all data in Snowflake. Combining the AI Data Cloud with data tools like Fivetran and Apache Airflow, Healthee can process data and extract insights from its own data along with HubSpot, Gong and third-party datasets.
These insights are vital to continuously improving Healthee’s platform. First, they allow Healthee to develop new product features and improvements. By analyzing how users interact with the platform, and with Zoe, Healthee’s customer-facing AI chatbot, product teams can optimize the Healthee platform to maintain user engagement and retention, and keep customers connected to essential healthcare services.
Snowflake also enables customer success teams to strengthen customer interactions, boosting retention and platform usage. For example, a customer success manager can ask Healthee 360, Healthee’s internal AI chatbot powered by Cortex AI, for all usage data from a particular customer. Then, the agent can query that customer’s data in Snowflake to provide a helpful summary in seconds.
“Snowflake’s AI capabilities have helped lower the barrier to entry and democratize data,” explains Hasbani. “I’d estimate half of the company now has access to insights in Snowflake. From R&D and product management, to customer success, sales and operations teams, Snowflake empowers non-technical staff like never before.”
Crucially, Snowflake also helps Healthee’s customers get more insights into platform usage and insurance and benefit utilization. “This can lead to significant cost reduction for our customers,” says Hasbani. “Customers can optimize the way they deliver insurance plans to employees and negotiate better deals with insurers based on employee usage.”
Freeing up valuable engineering resources with rapid feature development
Beyond lowering the barrier to entry for non-technical teams, Snowflake also helps Healthee reduce the burden on data analysts and R&D personnel. “Non-technical teams no longer need to ask for help with basic queries around user registrations or usage patterns,” explains Hasbani. “That really cuts down the tasks R&D has to deal with, freeing them up to deliver more value elsewhere.”
Already, this frees up resources to power further data platform improvements. But the addition of Cortex AI turbocharges the pace of development. “Snowflake has unlocked a new tier of AI feature development for us,” explains Hasbani. “We’re able to make improvements to our chatbot, Zoe, in a matter of weeks. Without Cortex, I’d imagine it would take five times as long to achieve this rate of development.”
People are really happy with everything Snowflake provides. It’s the most positive I’ve ever seen the team about a piece of software."
Ofir Hasbani
Engineering Group Manager, Healthee
Delivering even better healthcare understanding with richer data and even better AI capabilities
With this new, rapid pace of development, Healthee, on AWS, plans to continue enhancing its AI capabilities and insurance navigation platform for employees and customers alike.
“As we set up our AI workflow before the launch of Snowflake CoWork, many of our teams are already using Cortex AI agents across different functions, and we’re focused on deepening that integration as our AI workflows mature,” says Hasbani. “We’re looking at better integrating the two AI agent platforms so every system can talk to each other and unlock new, more complex insights.”
The team is also planning to create new Cortex AI agents per customer tenant. This would allow multiple Healthee AI agents to talk to each other, unlocking new use cases where employer and employee chatbots can collaborate to answer complex queries and better serve all users.
Finally, Hasbani is investigating ways to streamline how Healthee collects third party data. “Previously we’d rely on partners to supply data sets we needed to enrich and verify our insights,” recalls Hasbani. “But we see the value in getting access to over 800 data providers directly through Snowflake Marketplace in the future.”
Whether it’s day-to-day data access and management today or scaling AI feature development, Snowflake is helping Healthee streamline and simplify all data and AI operations. “Everything we do at Healthee aims to ease the lives of people in the U.S. as they navigate their healthcare insurance and benefits,” says Hasbani. “To achieve this goal, we need to make things simpler for ourselves so we can keep improving our platform. Snowflake has been a key part of making this possible.”
