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 more than a migration. They needed a partner who could modernize the stack while providing the 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.

Part 1: Operational Excellence—The Complex Migration

North Labs executed a "think-first" migration to Snowflake, utilizing a three-phase approach to ensure business continuity while maximizing immediate ROI.

A Proven Three-Phase Execution Model

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.

Part 2: The Value of Advisor-Led Strategy

Beyond the technical "lift-and-shift," North Labs provided a Strategic Data Advisory layer—executive-level guidance to navigate the hard conversations necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Strategic Depth & Independent Advocacy

Advisory services provided AffirmedRx with a technical counterweight during vendor negotiations. By benchmarking pricing and evaluating "build vs. buy" scenarios, North Labs ensured the technology roadmap was driven by AffirmedRx's strategic goals, not vendor sales targets.

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.

Part 3: Innovation Beyond Technical Debt

The ultimate impact of this partnership is the shift 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.

Summary of Strategic Value

Without North Labs Advisory	With North Labs Advisory
Learning through trial and error	Learning from others' experience
Vendor-driven (biased) decisions	Independent, objective evaluation
Key-person dependencies	Documented, transferable knowledge
Reactive problem-solving	Proactive risk & cost mitigation

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.