
CUSTOMER STORIES
NYC Health + Hospitals Elevates Care for New Yorkers Experiencing Homelessness
Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud is at the core of NYC Health + Hospitals’ data hub, which provides timely patient insights for supporting New York’s vulnerable populations.
KEY RESULTS:
5
Minutes to equip users with updated membership data — down from five days
100B+
Rows of healthcare data in Snowflake provide a holistic view of patients


Industry
Healthcare, Public SectorLocation
New York, New YorkSolving an age-old problem with modern technology and reliable data
Homelessness in New York City has surged to its highest level since the Great Depression. Reducing homelessness in the nation’s biggest city is a complex endeavor that starts by understanding those in need. NYC Health + Hospitals — the largest municipal health system in the United States — is focused on using data and analytics to understand the vulnerable populations that it serves and, ultimately, deliver faster, better care to improve lives.
NYC Health + Hospitals relies on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to centralize large amounts of healthcare data, surface insights that drive efficiency, and begin to maximize the benefits of generative AI through Snowflake Cortex AI. Powering its “data hub” initiative with Snowflake helps NYC Health + Hospitals develop comprehensive views of patients — especially for those patients experiencing homelessness.
Story Highlights
- Better care for New Yorkers with a holistic view of data: Building NYC Health + Hospitals’ data platform on Snowflake provides near-infinite scaling of storage and compute to integrate billions of rows of healthcare data, which can help care providers better understand and serve New Yorkers in need.
- Access to membership data in minutes — not days: With the ability to ingest health plan membership data more efficiently, teams across NYC Health + Hospitals can make better, faster decisions to help patients.
- Simpler data sharing with built-in security: Snowflake Secure Data Sharing can simplify collaboration with multiple partners and city agencies, while Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s unified security and governance features ensure peace of mind in the highly regulated healthcare industry.
Providing personalized care to all New Yorkers, regardless of their ability to pay
Serving over 1.4 million New Yorkers at more than 70 patient care locations involves a tremendous amount of clinical, enrollment, eligibility, membership, claim, social services and attribution data. Securely managing protected health information (PHI) from many different sources is challenging but essential for providing analytics to physicians, clinical care teams, insurance payers and other stakeholders.
Thanks to Snowflake’s elastic performance engine with optimized storage, NYC Health + Hospitals now has a scalable solution to store its more than 100 billion rows of data. Access to Snowflake’s built-in security and privacy controls, built specifically for healthcare needs, also helps the hospital network maintain patient privacy. “We’re talking about working with sensitive patient data — data that’s related to people’s mental health and specific clinical conditions,” says Shahran Haider, Deputy Chief Data Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals. “So, we have to build in security, governance, auditability, traceability and compliance from the very beginning, which Snowflake helps us achieve.”
Seeking to better understand and care for patients who are experiencing homelessness, NYC Health + Hospitals began exploring opportunities to enable expedited data availability and cloud data sharing among various NYC agencies and partner organizations to make patient data sharing easier and faster. The organization’s enterprise information management group reimagined its existing data architecture with the goal to more easily ingest, integrate and share patient data — while moving data less. “It was great that we already had Snowflake,” Haider says. “Snowflake has capabilities that we could use to address data sharing, security, automation and other features that we wanted to build into the solution.”
Delivering health plan membership data to stakeholders in minutes, not days
Data integrity, literacy and governance are key components of NYC Health + Hospitals’ analytics strategy, which aims to provide data solutions for stakeholders. Continually partnering with internal and external teams encourages healthy conversations for understanding data needs, overcoming data pipeline inefficiencies and building a better data hub. For example, rearchitecting data ingestion from multiple payers — including MetroPlusHealth, a health insurance company and wholly owned subsidiary of NYC Health + Hospitals — streamlined the data ingestion process and resulted in an automated pipeline for delivering updated membership data.

“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.”
Shahran Haider
Expedited delivery of membership data can empower a variety of NYC Health + Hospitals teams — from managed care to population health to finance — to make better, faster decisions. Automated alerts keep users in the loop as new data becomes available, further simplifying the process for stakeholders. According to Haider, “No matter the department, if they need to use a copy of the core data — which, in this case, is membership information — they get it at the same time.” Built-in security features from Snowflake Horizon Catalog, including role-based access control (RBAC), help ensure the right people have access to the right data.
Account-to-account data sharing via Snowflake Secure Data Sharing can also enhance collaboration with external partners. “We’re talking about one database, which is updated based on our operations and frequency,” Haider says. “At the same time, the external partner can also access and write back to the database if configured that way in Snowflake.”
Coordinating better, more holistic patient care
Connecting NYC Health + Hospitals’ patients with proper care can now be easier and faster thanks in part to efficient ingestion and sharing of membership data. “Accessing information as quickly as possible has massive implications from a care perspective because we’re talking about a very vulnerable population with complex, chronic conditions,” Haider says. Combining membership data with emergency room and homeless shelter data can provide a more complete patient view for care coordinators to intervene at the right moment and drive better outcomes.
“Our guiding star is to provide care to all New Yorkers. The efficiency and performance improvements we’ve achieved with Snowflake all contribute to this ultimate mission.”
Shahran Haider
Moving forward, quantifying data’s impact on the wellbeing of its patients is a top priority for NYC Health + Hospitals. “Our strategy must focus on data’s impact and how it is actually translating into healthcare improvement,” Haider says. “We need to be able to quantify the value and focus on things that drive the most powerful outcomes.”
Using generative AI responsibly to improve even more lives
Streamlining access to even more data will put NYC Health + Hospitals in a better position to unleash greater outcomes through generative AI. Haider says, “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,” Haider says.
As part of that objective. NYC Health + Hospitals has formed an enterprise AI advisory board to focus on three primary areas. Haider says, “First, where do we make strategic investments in AI to further our priorities and mission? Second, how do we ensure that we implement AI that is safe, ethical and responsible? LLMs and AI systems are learning from biases we already have in our society, and we cannot allow that to perpetuate in the healthcare system. And third, as a public healthcare system, how do we define return on investment so we can do more with less?”
NYC Health + Hospitals’ board has identified dozens of high-priority use cases to explore and implement across the enterprise — and they’re using Snowflake to experiment and prove value.

“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.”
Shahran Haider
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