Industry
HealthcareLocation
Coppell, TXA data-first approach to improving patient outcomes
AMN Healthcare provides innovative staffing and talent solutions to help more than 10,000 clients reduce complexity, increase efficiency and improve patient outcomes. AMN Healthcare is one of the United States’ largest healthcare staffing companies with as many as 25,000 professionals on assignment at any given time. To provide data-driven insights for clients and internal users, AMN Healthcare ingests and analyzes large amounts of staffing and operational data.
Story Highlights
Single source of truth: Ingesting data into Snowflake reduces data silos and provides a unified view of AMN Healthcare’s data.
Simpler data ingestion and visualization: Connecting Microsoft Azure Data Factory and Microsoft Power BI to Snowflake has improved performance while reducing data pipeline complexity.
$2.2 million annual cost savings: Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture with per-second pricing has helped AMN Healthcare reimagine its data environment to save millions every year.
Overcoming data lake complexity and rising costs
Leaders at AMN Healthcare needed timely access to reliable data and insights, but connecting directly to production databases caused resource contention and reporting delays. Seeking to enable streamlined reporting and analytics, AMN Healthcare decided to implement Microsoft Power BI and centralize its data into a single source of truth.
“We started an initiative to establish a data lake because we knew the importance of getting all of the data into the same environment,” says AMN Healthcare’s Director of Data Management and Analytics, Mario Melendez.
AMN Healthcare’s original data lake architecture was operationally burdensome to administer and difficult to scale. Ingesting data involved the use of a third-party data onboarding tool, which led to additional cost and complexity. According to Melendez, “We were instantly and absolutely in over our heads with the first environment.”
Migrating AMN Healthcare's data lake to Databricks consolidated their data and allowed them to scale, but the data and analytics team still struggled to optimize for performance and cost. Data pipeline challenges led AMN Healthcare to spend approximately $90,000 per month on a center of excellence that troubleshot failed jobs and patched software. The total cost of AMN Healthcare’s data environment grew to $2.4 million per year, but allocating costs to specific projects and teams was cumbersome.
Achieving a convenient, unified view of data
Switching to Snowflake solved AMN Healthcare’s performance issues with less data pipeline complexity. Ingesting data into Snowflake via Azure Data Factory eliminated the need for AMN Healthcare’s previous data onboarding tool and allowed the team to leverage their SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) expertise. Creating stored procedures in Snowflake offered a convenient solution for transforming data.
Loading data from in-house and third-party applications into Snowflake made it possible to achieve a unified view of AMN Healthcare’s data. “We’re extending the functionality of these applications by getting data into Snowflake and developing data warehouses and reports,” Melendez says. Connecting Microsoft Power BI to Snowflake elevated data’s impact for users across the organization.
Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture with per-second pricing increased transparency for managing costs. Snowflake’s near-zero maintenance freed up technical talent to focus on higher-impact work.
Lowering costs by 93% while onboarding even more data
With Snowflake and Microsoft Azure Data Factory, AMN Healthcare’s data environment costs have dropped to $14,000 per month—down from $200,000—despite storing approximately 50% more data. According to Melendez, “The cost savings are incredible. On an annual basis, we will be able to realize a savings of $2.2 million dollars.”
The cost savings are incredible. On an annual basis, we will be able to realize a savings of $2.2 million dollars.”
Mario Melendez
Director, Data Management and Analytics, AMN Healthcare
Accelerating data analysis and BI
Centralizing data in Snowflake enables AMN Healthcare’s analysts to explore staffing opportunities by city, region and specialty. “Our analytics team can easily write queries that join data from Salesforce and PeopleSoft without hopping between databases,” Melendez says.
Numerous departments and teams at AMN Healthcare rely on Microsoft Power BI and Snowflake for data-driven dashboards and reports. For example, AMN Healthcare’s business review dashboard keeps sales leaders informed about key metrics that impact client success. Candidate dashboards help staffing experts fill open positions with talent from nearby markets to minimize relocation expenses. Operations teams monitor job runtime performance with less back and forth. According to Melendez, “We can put that data in Snowflake and provide an operational dashboard instead of having to contact the DBA team.”
Client-facing dashboards provide visibility for tracking successful placements, average rates by position, and cost of doing business with AMN Healthcare. Rapidly responding to clients’ time-sensitive ad hoc reporting requests is also easier with Snowflake. “When strikes occur, clients need near real-time dashboards to staff up quickly,” Melendez says.
Hitting SLAs with less administrative effort
Rearchitecting AMN Healthcare’s data environment with Snowflake and Microsoft Azure Data Factory has led to a 99.9% pipeline success rate and a 75% reduction in data warehouse runtime. Each day, AMN Healthcare writes over 100 GB of data and replicates 1,176 tables to Snowflake while consistently hitting data replication SLAs.
By taking advantage of the Snowflake virtual warehouse, we were able to meet our one-to-three-minute SLA for processing pipelines and bring down total runtimes by as much as 75%.”
Mario Melendez
Director, Data Management and Analytics, AMN Healthcare
Streamlining data sharing and data science
Securely sharing data with clients via Snowflake Secure Data Sharing is a priority for AMN Healthcare. Snowflake’s Direct Share feature will enable account-to-account data sharing without copying or moving data sets via SFTP or APIs. Snowflake reader accounts will provide live access to data for AMN Healthcare’s clients that are not Snowflake customers. According to Melendez, “We like that the data stays where it is and we just give people secure access to it.”
Leveraging Snowflake as a single repository for data science is also on the roadmap. “For future [machine learning] and AI projects, we’re absolutely going to look at the tools we already have in place, starting with Snowflake,” Melendez said. Snowpark will make it easier for AMN Healthcare’s developers to deploy models without creating new data silos.
