Cambia Health Solutions Streamlines Data Feeds With Inovalon and Snowflake

Cambia Health Solutions, a company dedicated to transforming the healthcare experience, set out to modernize how it manages and delivers critical data to its quality measurement programs. Facing inefficiencies and manual processes in their legacy data pipeline, Cambia saw an opportunity to leverage its enterprise data platform — built on Snowflake — to create a more automated, efficient, and connected approach.  

Inovalon and Cambia collaborated to build a modernized pipeline that has already begun saving time, improving data visibility, and positioning Cambia to deliver more frequent, timely quality insights.  

As Cambia evolved its enterprise data platform strategy, the team recognized a growing need to modernize one of its most critical data feeds: its pipeline to the HEDIS® quality engine.   

“We all know how important HEDIS is,” said Madeline Hasegawa, Data Product Manager at Cambia. “So we thought, ‘what value are we potentially leaving on the table by keeping our legacy pipeline unchanged?’”   

The existing process was highly manual. Data from multiple sources — membership, claims, and supplemental data — had to be assembled and normalized manually, often living in different locations across the organization. This fragmentation made it difficult to create a unified, real-time view of the member population and slowed down the ability to analyze and act on quality data.   

“We had significant manual processing,” Hasegawa explained. “Going forward, we wanted the data to be connected, in one place, easy to get to, governed — all the bells and whistles.”   

The limitations of the legacy process also made timely quality reporting a challenge. Because preparing and validating data took significant effort, Cambia could only refresh and send files once a month. The team knew a more connected, automated pipeline could help them accelerate their work and unlock faster, more actionable insights.   

Cambia saw an opportunity to reimagine its HEDIS data feed using Snowflake data sharing with Inovalon’s quality measurement solutions — a first-of-its-kind implementation for both teams.    

“Originally, we thought we could simply send files back and forth,” Hasegawa said. “But now that we are on Snowflake, we wanted to use Snowflake data sharing because it is so much faster, it’s easier for us to refresh a table or a dataset, it’s easier to manage and it’s still accessible, and it’s all in one place – we do not need to try and manage a bunch of different files.”    

The impact was felt quickly. Having the data in Snowflake from start to finish made it easier to run checks, identify issues, and resolve them in real time. “The real win is the time savings in debugging,” Hasegawa shared. “Having the data exclusively within Snowflake from start to finish has made the process a lot smoother.”    

With a more stable and scalable process, Cambia plans to move from monthly to twice-monthly HEDIS runs — a major step forward in data freshness and operational efficiency. “I am most excited about running the engine twice a month,” Hasegawa said. “It will be much more feasible with Snowflake and Inovalon because of the significant reduction in overhead.”     

Looking ahead, Cambia plans to extend the benefits even further, integrating its more timely HEDIS results into provider-facing applications and other systems to accelerate gap closure and improve member outcomes.     

“Our ability to move significantly faster and with a lot more ease will unlock new insights and more up-to-date information for Cambia, our members, and our providers,” Hasegawa said.