As one of the leading healthcare improvement companies in the U.S., Premier’s mission is to improve community health by enabling better, smarter, and faster healthcare for providers. Serving two out of every three U.S. healthcare providers, Premier processes massive amounts of data in a regulated industry known for strict compliance requirements and a fragmented data landscape. In this high-stakes environment, Premier works to ensure that data and insights are readily available, so providers can make informed decisions for their patients.
Premier also needed a platform capable of advancing its AI strategy and delivering trustworthy, AI-ready data across its products and services. Prior to Databricks, Premier used a mix of existing data warehouses and databases; while these platforms supported earlier needs, Premier sought a more scalable foundation to support an AI-first future and accelerate delivery across teams. Since migrating to Databricks SQL, Premier has improved performance, reduced costs, and accelerated time to impact—delivering tangible benefits for providers and the patients they serve.
Scaling existing platforms for modern healthcare analytics
Premier offers a range of solutions to enhance community health, including optimizing supply pricing, improving the quality of care, and assisting providers in benchmarking and improving their performance. In healthcare, data readiness is often complex. Payers, providers, independent practitioners, and suppliers all generate data in fragmented systems across the healthcare ecosystem that are difficult to integrate. Strict privacy regulations make the challenge even greater. For the Premier data team, success relies on delivering high-quality AI-ready data to hospitals, health systems, physicians, and life sciences companies that rely on their products. Data readiness involves processing billions of medical records, such as real-time HL7 healthcare transactions and daily batch files.
For years, Premier relied on a mix of established enterprise data platforms, including Teradata, Azure Synapse, and Oracle. As data volumes and user demand expanded, the team sought more consistent performance at peak concurrency and improved price-performance at scale. Two of Premier’s flagship products—Quality Enterprise and INsights—experienced rapid growth that increased requirements on their underlying data warehouses. Quality Enterprise, a benchmarking tool for measuring outcomes, improving costs, and transforming care, is used by more than 20,000 users. As adoption grew, Premier sought a new approach to support increasing concurrency and accelerate insight delivery—while maintaining strong cost efficiency. In parallel, this work was aligned to desired innovation and growth timelines, with end-of-support also informing the roadmap for long-term growth.
INsights, Premier’s platform that helps healthcare organizations accelerate AI-ready analytics, similarly required a strong foundation as it expanded to 77 health systems and supported more sophisticated queries and higher dashboard concurrency. Premier evaluated options to ensure predictable performance for embedded BI use cases and to maintain cost efficiency as workloads grew. Steve Cornett, Principal Architect at Premier, explains, “With Teradata and Synapse, cost efficiency and concurrency became harder to optimize as usage increased at scale. We needed a platform that could grow with demand without adding operational complexity, while continuing to deliver strong performance. Planning for long-term support, Premier chose a modern platform to power future growth.”
From complexity to reliable, scalable insights
By migrating from a mix of existing data warehouses to Databricks SQL, Premier more easily addressed data readiness, performance, and rising demand across its solutions. Consolidating data and analytics on a single platform reduced complexity, improved speed, and lowered costs.
With Databricks SQL Serverless, Premier can scale efficiently and allocate compute by workload, as opposed to having to share compute across workloads. This flexibility improves both performance and cost efficiency by allowing the team to right-size resources instead of over-provisioning. From an operations standpoint, Databricks has also simplified infrastructure management. “The ability to spin up separate compute resources for different workloads, such as SQL queries and ETL jobs, is game-changing,” says Brian Judd, Principal Architect at Premier. Compared to approaches that required specialized tuning and ongoing oversight, Databricks SQL scales automatically—making data operations more accessible and freeing architects to focus on higher-value work. As Miguel Barrientos, Principal Architect at Premier notes, “With Databricks SQL, you don’t need to be a genius to get performance. It’s simple to scale, easy to manage, and performance just works.”
Beyond analytics, Databricks SQL has transformed the way that Premier can deliver AI applications, such as INsights. Because Databricks SQL runs on the same unified platform as Databricks’ AI and ML capabilities, Premier can prepare and serve AI-ready data directly from its warehouse, reducing unnecessary data movement, ensuring governance, and accelerating the delivery of AI-driven insights across its products and services.
For business intelligence, Premier can connect Tableau, MicroStrategy (now Strategy), and Power BI directly to Databricks SQL, giving users fast, reliable dashboards at scale. Features like predictive optimization help Premier adapt to changing demand as usage grows across its products. By separating compute for BI queries from ETL workloads, Premier’s data team reduced the need for complicated workload management—helping dashboards run faster and more predictably while keeping costs under control. This shift also gave the team valuable time back, because they no longer need to constantly fine-tune system performance. With Databricks SQL as its foundation, Premier is well-positioned to continue scaling and to support providers and patients with timely, AI-ready insights that improve care outcomes.
Driving savings and better patient outcomes
Migrating to Databricks SQL has delivered tangible results for Premier, enabling faster insights, simpler operations, and measurable business impact. With Databricks, the company has modernized its data platform and delivered new capabilities to consultants, developers, and members to drive savings and improve patient care.
One of the biggest business impacts from migrating to Databricks SQL has been consultant productivity. Premier’s 500+ on-the-ground consultants now benefit from AI features integrated into Databricks, such as Genie Code and Databricks Assistant, which can help generate SQL queries, explain complex code, and identify and fix errors. This efficiency translates into real financial value for hospitals and health systems, many of which operate on razor-thin margins. Riddle explains, “In less than three hours, consultants can now complete a patient flow analysis that previously could take days. Databricks SQL speed + AI (Genie) provides a critical edge when decisions must be made quickly.”
Looking ahead, Premier plans to migrate even more projects to Databricks SQL, building on the momentum of its early successes. Riddle notes, “Databricks has made complex tasks easier and has allowed us to create a modern foundation for scaling AI innovation across the healthcare industry. Delivering AI through our continuously improving AI-ready data has been, and will remain, fundamental to our journey.”