Snowflake Partners with NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure: What Does it Mean for Healthcare?
With Generative AI as the catalyst, healthcare is entering a period of rapid technological change that may prove to be even more consequential than the era of Meaningful Use.
I can’t help but think this after returning from the recent Snowflake Summit where the host announced two separate and important partnership agreements with NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure that clearly signal where health IT is heading.
Snowflake and other Data Cloud providers understand that harnessing healthcare data for better patient care requires more processing power and the development of sophisticated, but user-friendly applications for complex data analysis and rapid learning.
Snowflake's partnerships with NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure aim to address these challenges by providing healthcare organizations with an agile cloud data warehouse for their growing healthcare datasets along with tools to unlock valuable insights. With Snowflake on Azure, organizations can securely analyze their data on a massive scale. And with NVIDIA, they gain access to new development tools (the NVIDIA NeMo framework) to build, customize and deploy AI applications utilizing proprietary data.
The partnership with NVIDIA also gives Snowflake customers access to NVIDIA's specialized GPUs optimized for AI and machine learning workloads. For healthcare organizations, this could mean significantly improved performance for running predictive analytics, pattern detection, and other ML models on their data-enabling advanced technologies that enhance patient care and outcomes.
The Microsoft Azure partnership opens Snowflake's capabilities to Azure's large customer base, many of whom are in the healthcare sector. With Snowflake available on Azure, these organizations can now query petabytes of healthcare data stored in Snowflake's data warehouse using familiar Azure tools and services. They also get all the security, compliance, and governance features built into both Snowflake's and Azure's platforms—especially important for managing regulated healthcare data.
Snowflake's partnerships with NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure come at an important time for healthcare organizations. As health systems grapple with increasingly complex datasets and look to advance care through new technologies, solutions that enhance data analytics capabilities while ensuring security and compliance are essential.
It is far too early in this new era of innovation to sort out the ultimate winners, but proven entities like Snowflake, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are good bets to lead the way. My colleagues in health IT will do well to follow the ongoing developments and results from these partnerships.
Chief Innovation and Transformation Officer John McDaniel has over 50 years’ experience in Health IT as C-level advisor and executive and is a former CIO at Kingman Regional Medical Center, St Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers and McLaren Health. Healthcare IT Leaders is a registered Snowflake partner.