Case Study: Sanford Health achieves accelerated precision medicine and scalable genomic analytics with Databricks

Sanford Health - Customer Case Study

Sanford Health, an integrated health system headquartered in the Dakotas with over 28,000 employees and the largest rural, not‑for‑profit healthcare system in the U.S., needed to analyze massive patient datasets—100k+ genomes, medical images and health records—to identify genetic mutations driving chronic disease. Limited DevOps and engineering expertise made it difficult to build and scale the infrastructure for analytics and machine learning, a process that previously could take months or years.

Databricks delivered a unified, fully managed analytics platform on AWS that preserves HIPAA‑grade data integrity, simplifies data engineering, and automates cluster management so teams can provision and scale on demand—cutting time to insight from days to hours. By enabling larger, integrated datasets, an interactive collaborative workspace, and faster model development and clinical validation, Sanford accelerated clinically validated screening and precision, preventative care while reducing cost and operational burden.

Sanford Health

Lynn Carmichael

Senior Director of Computational Bioinformatics