Case Study: Healthdirect Australia achieves 6x faster data processing and real-time patient insights with Databricks

Healthdirect Australia - Customer Case Study

Healthdirect Australia, steward of the National Health Services Directory, faced fragmented data silos, strict governance and HIPAA-like compliance needs, and a legacy stack that couldn’t scale for growing transaction volumes (over 1 billion data points / ~1 TB). Batch overruns and inconsistent, low‑quality data slowed analytics and blocked timely patient-centric insights.

Using Databricks with Delta Lake and Spark Structured Streaming, Healthdirect built a modern clinical data lake with logical Landing/Raw/Staging/Gold zones and metadata-driven schemas, converting batch ETL to streaming. The result: 6x faster processing, 1 million records per minute (20 million records loaded in 20 minutes), fuzzy-name match accuracy improved from <60% to 95% with no manual intervention, 30,000 automated updates/month (vs. six months previously), stronger security/compliance, and faster time-to-market for analytics.

Healthdirect Australia

Peter James

Chief Architect