In a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, organizations are transitioning to modern data and analytics ecosystems to enhance efficiency and improve decision-making. Health Catalyst recognized that its internal analytics team was facing challenges common to many healthcare organizations: fragmented workflows, computational inefficiencies, and delays in delivering insights. To address this, it deployed Health Catalyst Ignite™ Data and Analytics, a unified data and analytics platform to replace legacy tools. This modernization eliminated reliance on outdated tools, streamlined workflows, and enabled AI integration across the data lifecycle—reducing costs, accelerating insights, and allowing analysts to focus on high-value work.
In a healthcare environment characterized by financial pressure, operational complexity, and the urgent need for insight, healthcare improvement organizations are migrating to dynamic, next-generation data and analytics ecosystems to enhance decision-making, gain faster insights, and maximize investment.
Health Catalyst found its internal corporate analytics team facing the same challenges it helps healthcare organizations solve: fragmented workflows, computational inefficiencies, and delays in time-to-insight.
The analytics team was responsible for delivering critical insights to stakeholders across research and development, operations, sales and marketing, finance, and human resources, but their data management tools and functions, data products, and self-service tools applications weren’t keeping pace with the organization’s growing needs and demands.
Corporate analytics team members relied on numerous tools, multiple ETL processes, and external scripts to stage data. Each analytic job required juggling disparate systems to design and load staging tables before ingestion, which slowed the generation of insights.
In a climate where cost optimization and speed-to-insight are strategic imperatives, Health Catalyst needed more than incremental improvement. It required a modern analytics foundation that could support scale, reduce overhead costs, and integrate AI capabilities natively without requiring additional personnel or tools.
To modernize its internal analytics infrastructure, Health Catalyst deployed Ignite, its next-generation data and analytics ecosystem. This shift marked a significant evolution as the organization moved from a multi-tool, manually orchestrated workflow to a single, unified platform where all data engineering, transformation, and analytics can occur in one place.
Ignite eliminated the need for external job schedulers and redundant staging steps. In the previous environment, producing a usable dataset involved numerous actions across multiple tools. Now, all data ingestion, transformation, scheduling, and staging occur within the analytics platform, eliminating the need for separate job orchestration. Another impactful change is how Ignite handles schema drift—the gradual or unexpected change in a data source’s structure over time. In the old world, when source systems changed fields, the analytics team had to manually identify and update downstream tables, a time-consuming, error-prone process. Now, Ignite automatically detects schema changes, logs them with timestamps, and makes the necessary adjustments.
The streamlined processes decreased complexity and the number of touchpoints and dependencies, allowing analysts to spend more time generating value and less time maintaining pipelines.
“Ignite has allowed us to shift from maintaining pipelines to maximizing value. Now, our analysts can focus on insight, not orchestration."
- Brian Eliason, MIS, Senior Vice President, Corporate Analytics and Strategic Vendor Partnerships, Health Catalyst
The Ignite architecture also improves compute performance and cost control. With Ignite, compute usage is fully visible and adjustable. Teams can allocate compute budgets, monitor usage in real-time, and scale resources deliberately.
Ignite introduced built-in observability and intelligent alerting, enabling the analytics team to detect issues proactively and respond faster. Instead of simply monitoring for job success or failure, teams can now define custom thresholds and rules based on what truly matters to their pipelines:
Teams can customize both alert conditions and the delivery methods. Alerts can be sent via email, the ticketing system, or instant messaging platforms, depending on what will prompt the fastest, most effective response. For example, instant messages may be ideal for engineering teams actively managing jobs in real time, while a ticket could trigger deeper investigation and documentation.
Ignite’s native support for AI and machine learning enables teams to apply predictive algorithms directly within their workflows. Rather than treating AI as an experimental overlay, Health Catalyst is embedding it directly into the data lifecycle, positioning the organization to act on insights as they emerge. Use cases in development include using engagement and project management data to predict if projects will be completed on time, enabling interventions for projects that may not be on time, and combining usage and engagement data to identify an overall client health score—key to client retention efforts.
Ignite supports strong data governance, rapid query performance, and trustworthy lineage across all pipelines. Observability is built in, providing complete visibility into job performance and error tracking, allowing the team to proactively manage workloads with confidence.
"What used to be a multi-step, multi-tool process is now streamlined into a single, intelligent platform—we’re saving time, compute, and sanity."
- Dave Ross, BSIS, Chief Technology Officer, Health Catalyst
Shifting to Ignite has transformed internal analytics at Health Catalyst. What was once a costly, multi-tool chore is now a swift, in-platform process that delivers deeper insights faster.
With streamlined pipelines, reduced compute usage, and embedded AI capabilities, Health Catalyst empowers its analytics team to deliver real-time insights with cost transparency and operational precision and enables self-service analytics. Results include:
“With Ignite, we’re able to visualize data faster. It’s enabling us to make confident decisions in real-time instead of waiting days for answers."
- Ryan Barry, PMP, CSM, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Services, Health Catalyst
With a modern data and analytics ecosystem, Health Catalyst is poised to accelerate innovation further and scale the impact of analytics across the organization.
