Cloud-based big data company Snowflake Inc. today announced its latest industry vertical data-sharing platform, this time targeting the healthcare and life sciences sectors.

The new offering integrates Snowflake’s core cloud data warehouse, analytics and business intelligence services with a live data marketplace and on-demand consulting.

Snowflake said the Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud platform is a response to the growing struggles of the healthcare industry amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the pressure that has placed it under. The software-as-a-service offering amalgamates Snowflake’s core applications with a variety of third-party services and will give healthcare providers a way to access and share medical data more easily.

It should be beneficial to many healthcare providers, because the task of leveraging medical data for innovation is one that’s burdened with regulatory and technical challenges. Many firms in the healthcare industry rely on legacy data architectures, with information stored in fragmented silos. They have to follow strict compliance rules, and there are no common models for sharing data in the industry. That makes it difficult to use healthcare data for advanced analytics and artificial intelligence projects.

Snowflake’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud is aimed at solving that problem by eliminating the technical and institutional silos while ensuring everything meets the security, governance and compliance requirements of the industry.

Besides its cloud data warehouse, the service will see Snowflake offer machine learning and other applications from its technology partners, which include Amazon Web Services Inc., Alation Inc., Dataiku Inc., H20.ai Inc., ThoughtSpot Inc., Health Catalyst and others. The platform’s native integration with these applications will help healthcare providers to bring new services to market faster, Snowflake said.

The health data marketplace includes data offerings from firms such as Equifax Inc., Invaitae Corp., IQVIA Inc., SameSky Health Inc. and Compile Inc. Through the marketplace, these data providers can securely exchange datasets, eliminating the need for traditional data sharing methods that involve lots of copying and movement.

On the consulting side, Snowflake’s partners include Deloitte Touche Ltd., Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Inc. and NTT Data Corp. Healthcare firms will be able to engage with these organizations directly within the new offering to help accelerate their digital transformation journeys, Snowflake said.

Snowflake has been trying to repackage its core services with third-party products and services to grow adoption of its cloud data warehouse. Last year, it launched its first industry-specific foray with its Financial Services Data Cloud.

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