Case Study: Health Data Company achieves 30x faster researcher access and $1M annual savings with Immuta

How a Health Data Company Revolutionized Research on Sensitive Data with Immuta

Health Data Company is a health-data non-profit that accelerates ethical, public-interest research by sharing commercial, donated, and public datasets (for example, a geolocation set from 50 million mobile phones) with volunteer data scientists and academic researchers. Because much of this data is highly re-identifiable, the organization faced legal, ethical, and operational challenges: balancing privacy and utility, managing sensitive data in a Snowflake data lake, and supporting a rotating, interdisciplinary contributor base without months-long manual access processes — so they partnered with Immuta and its data access platform to address these issues.

Immuta implemented an automated data access layer with an active data catalog, self-service request workflows, attribute-based access controls (ABAC), and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that are natively enforced in Snowflake. As a result, Immuta cut time-to-data from 90 days to 3 days (30x faster), eliminated hundreds of role-based policies by moving to ABAC, reduced access-control policies to fewer than 10 authorable by nontechnical governance teams, and saved the organization over $1 million annually in data engineering costs.