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.
"North Labs delivered the clarity and strategic foresight required for AffirmedRx to lead as a Public Benefit Corporation."
— AffirmedRx Leadership
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.
North Labs executed a carefully planned migration to Snowflake, using a three-phase approach to ensure business continuity while maximizing immediate ROI. To mitigate migration risk, North Labs decoupled the process into logical stages, ensuring the business remained operational throughout the transition.
Immediate wins were achieved by repointing Power BI reports to query Snowflake directly, improving query performance without disrupting existing pipelines.
Compute-intensive workloads were centralized by moving all ETL/ELT logic and data modeling from Fabric to Snowflake.
The final phase unified the platform by migrating all ingestion pipelines into Snowflake-supported mechanisms, delivering end-to-end control.
Automatic scaling of compute and storage removed the need for manual capacity planning and routine maintenance.
Implementation of Snowflake Cortex Analyst enabled non-technical business users to access insights via natural language, reducing engineering bottlenecks.
By establishing budget enforcement and real-time dashboards, AffirmedRx avoided common cloud waste, ensuring every dollar spent supports patient-centric initiatives.
"With the new foundation in place, AffirmedRx can focus on patient-centric care and healthcare outcome transparency instead of infrastructure firefighting."
Beyond the migration itself, North Labs provided executive-level advisory: guidance to navigate the hard conversations necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.
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.
Advisory helps define organizational design and team structures that scale with the business.
By establishing chargeback models, teams are held accountable for their resource consumption.
Guiding the transition from daily file drops to live, secure data sharing.
By creating runbooks and documenting architectural decisions, North Labs reduces key-person risk.
With the migration and advisory in place, AffirmedRx shifted from reactive maintenance to proactive innovation.
Instead of manual coding, North Labs implemented configuration-based architectures, reducing client onboarding from weeks to days.
By building semantic layers and establishing data quality standards today, AffirmedRx is positioned to leverage Data and AI for competitive differentiation in the PBM market.
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.
Let's talk about how North Labs can help unlock the value in your data.