OM1

Challenge: Managing billions of data points and meeting self-serve requests

OM1’s fragmented, siloed analytics workflow was starting to break down at scale. A simple request from a business user — “How many patients do we have using this new drug?” — would turn into a days-long game of chutes and ladders across multiple teams and multiple tools. After a while, the data team noticed that less and less people were asking questions or requesting updates to reports.

But OM1 is a data company — they provide massive healthcare datasets of anonymized patient data to medical providers and researchers — so becoming less data driven was simply not an option.

Zach Bryant, Associate Director of Data & Analytics, had a bit of a crazy idea: instead of throwing money at the problem by hiring more clinical data engineers, what if they could turn their existing business users into clinical data engineers?

Solution: Hex for speed and building a powerful self-serve data app

The team needed analytics tooling that could both handle the frequent data updates on massive healthcare datasets and provide a user-friendly self-serve solution. OM1 brought on Hex and Snowflake, which accommodated the frequent data updates, letting the data team move faster. It also solved the self-serve gap.

OM1 then built a powerful data app — all in Hex — that let business users not just explore data, but actually manage the mappings for data categories without having to write any SQL or Python. “Our business users know what they want, they just can’t articulate it into the database or into the data structures.”

See OM1's Mapping Manager app here

With OM1’s Mapping Manager data app, business users dictate what they care about in a friendly UI and the rest happens automatically without the data team having to build tons of different metrics or an overly complicated, unmanageable semantic layer.

The data app in Hex sits right on top of Snowflake and was easy for the data team to build using multi-modal methods of working with data — combining intuitive UI-based features with SQL, Python, and Snowpark.

Impact: Data-team hours saved and new answers for sales and marketing

OM1 uses Hex as a unified analytics workspace that brings everyone together for data questions and Snowflake as a flexible compute and storage layer. With Hex sitting on top of Snowflake, OM1's data team was able to keep up with requests and provide timely, end-user customizable reports that worked with the size and complexity of their datasets.

OM1’s data app in Hex is saving the data team hours of time every week because sales and marketing teams can now perform tasks traditionally handled by data engineers. As a result they are able to help clinicians, researchers, and scientists in faster ways by quickly understanding the full spectrum of data that OM1 offers to them.