Case Study: Nuna, a healthcare data and analytics provider, slashes data‑warehouse costs 30x and speeds queries up to 10x with Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery)

Nuna Tackling U.S. healthcare costs and quality challenges with serverless analytics

Nuna is a San Francisco–based healthcare data and analytics company that helps payers, employers, providers, and government programs use data to improve care and reduce costs. Faced with an overloaded self-managed Hadoop query stack that was expensive to maintain, lacked strong data isolation, and frequently dropped queries (about a 2% error rate), Nuna couldn’t meet the fast, bursty dashboard needs of a new large employer client.

Nuna migrated its SQL warehouse to Google BigQuery (with Looker for visualization) after a two-week proof of concept and two-week migration. The serverless solution returned queries 2x–10x faster, eliminated dropped-query errors, and cut data warehousing costs by 30x with on-demand pricing. It also simplified security and compliance (default encryption, HIPAA BAA, FedRAMP) and improved customer data isolation, enabling Nuna to serve larger clients and deliver more responsive, reliable analytics.

Nuna

Sam King

Engineering Manager