Healthcare & Pharmacy

Building an AI-Ready Foundation for Patient-Centric Healthcare

How AffirmedRx and North Labs replaced technical debt with strategic innovation—combining a high-precision Snowflake migration with executive-level data advisory to establish a foundation built for patient-centric care.

The Challenge

AffirmedRx, a mission-driven Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM), required a data environment that reflected its commitment to clarity and integrity. Their existing infrastructure was burdened by legacy technical debt—outsized compute costs, rigid pipelines, and key-person dependencies that made the organization reactive instead of strategic.

Leadership needed to modernize the stack while also getting executive-level advisory to ensure they wouldn't repeat past mistakes.

AffirmedRx needed to move beyond infrastructure "firefighting" and establish a strategic data foundation that allows them to prioritize their mission—patient-centric care and healthcare outcome transparency.

Business Impact

Client Onboarding: Weeks → Days

Metadata-driven pipelines replaced manual coding, compressing client onboarding timelines from weeks to days.

Outsized Compute Costs Eliminated

Automatic scaling of compute and storage removed manual capacity planning—every dollar now supports patient-centric initiatives.

AI-Ready Foundation Established

Semantic layers and data quality standards position AffirmedRx to leverage AI for competitive differentiation in the PBM market.

The Migration

North Labs executed a carefully planned migration to Snowflake, using a three-phase approach to ensure business continuity while maximizing immediate ROI.

Three-Phase Migration Approach

To mitigate migration risk, North Labs decoupled the process into logical stages, ensuring the business remained operational throughout the transition:

Phase 1 — Transition Consumption: Immediate wins were achieved by repointing Power BI reports to query Snowflake directly, improving query performance without disrupting existing pipelines.
Phase 2 — Transition Transformation: Compute-intensive workloads were centralized by moving all ETL/ELT logic and data modeling from Fabric to Snowflake.
Phase 3 — Transition Ingestion: The final phase unified the platform by migrating all ingestion pipelines into Snowflake-supported mechanisms, delivering end-to-end control.

Tangible Business ROI

Lower Operational Overhead: Automatic scaling of compute and storage removed the need for manual capacity planning and routine maintenance.
Speed to Insight: Implementation of Snowflake Cortex Analyst enabled non-technical business users to access insights via natural language, reducing engineering bottlenecks.
Financial Governance (FinOps): By establishing budget enforcement and real-time dashboards, AffirmedRx avoided common cloud waste, ensuring every dollar spent supports patient-centric initiatives.

Strategic Advisory

Beyond the migration itself, North Labs provided executive-level advisory — guidance to navigate the hard conversations necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Independent Vendor Evaluation

North Labs provided AffirmedRx with technical guidance during vendor negotiations — benchmarking pricing and evaluating "build vs. buy" scenarios to keep the technology roadmap aligned with AffirmedRx's strategic goals.

Solving the Hard Questions

Strategic Growth: "How should we structure our team as we grow?" Advisory helps define organizational design and team structures that scale with the business.
Predictive Fiscal Control: "Where is our cloud money actually going?" By establishing chargeback models, teams are held accountable for their resource consumption.
Customer Experience: "How do we provide clients faster access to their data?" Guiding the transition from daily file drops to live, secure data sharing.
Operational Resilience: "What happens if our key engineer is unavailable?" By creating runbooks and documenting architectural decisions, North Labs reduces key-person risk.

The Outcome

With the migration and advisory in place, AffirmedRx shifted from reactive maintenance to proactive innovation.

Accelerating Business Capabilities

Metadata-Driven Pipelines: Instead of manual coding, North Labs implemented configuration-based architectures, reducing client onboarding from weeks to days.
AI-Ready Foundation: By building semantic layers and establishing data quality standards today, AffirmedRx is positioned to leverage AI for competitive differentiation in the PBM market.
Healthcare Compliance (CI/CD): Advisory established automated, non-human deployment patterns that provide the immutable audit trails required for healthcare regulatory audits.

The advisory engagement helped AffirmedRx replace trial-and-error decisions with experience-backed evaluation, reduce key-person risk through documentation, and shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive cost and risk management.

AffirmedRx now operates with a data foundation that is as mission-driven as the company itself—positioned to lead as a Public Benefit Corporation with the clarity and strategic foresight to back it up.