Databricks · Healthcare & Life Sciences

Pharma RWE platform on Databricks scales to 6 therapeutic areas

38% cut in study data prep · Unity Catalog as the compliance control point

ClientTop-10 global pharmaceutical company
Duration11 months
Industry Healthcare & Life Sciences →

At a glance

Key metrics

38%
reduction in study data prep
6
therapeutic areas live
OMOP
common data model across studies

Challenge

The situation

Per-therapeutic-area silos made cross-study analysis slow and governance inconsistent. Every study paid the compliance-review tax from scratch.

Approach

How we delivered

  1. 01 Consolidated RWE on Databricks Lakehouse with Unity Catalog as the PHI governance control point.
  2. 02 Standardized on OMOP to make cohorts reusable.
  3. 03 Packaged cohort-builder patterns as reusable, audit-friendly notebooks.

Architecture

Solution architecture

Claims, EHR, registry, and genomics data in Delta Lake. Transformations in dbt-on-Databricks. Vector Search over unstructured notes. Cohort-builder notebooks with approval gates; MLflow tracking every run.

Architecture diagram placeholder Data flow across source systems, platform, governance, and activation layers.

Outcomes

Measured results

  • 38% reduction in study data prep.
  • 6 therapeutic areas onboarded in 12 months.
  • Compliance narrative approved at first internal-audit review.

Technology

Tech stack

Platform

  • Databricks on Azure
  • Unity Catalog
  • Delta Lake

Tools

  • dbt
  • MLflow
  • Databricks Vector Search

Standards

  • OMOP CDM
  • FHIR

“Unity Catalog made governance a platform feature, not a project tax.”

— Head of RWE Engineering

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