Modernizing Clinical Informatics: How HUB International Transformed Its Data Strategy
In the traditionally slow-moving world of insurance and benefits consulting, HUB International has taken a bold step forward—rewiring its clinical informatics and data stack to become nimbler, more predictive, and better aligned with client and patient needs. Their journey, in partnership with Coalesce, offers lessons for any organization seeking to turn fragmented healthcare data into real business value.
The Challenge: Data Chaos in a Mature Industry
HUB International is one of the world’s largest insurance consulting firms, with around 18,000 employees and over $4 billion in revenue. On their employee benefits side alone, they manage a vast and complex data environment: medical, pharmacy, dental, vision claims; demographic and social determinant data; third-party feeds; and data from multiple acquired systems.
Historically, much of their analytics depended on manual Excel reporting—teams spending 80–100 hours per month just to compile baseline reports. A pilot workflow tool failed due to usability and adoption issues.
In short: the legacy approach couldn’t scale, couldn’t keep pace, and was limiting HUB’s ability to innovate.
Implementation: Speed and Scale
The transformation unfolded in phases—but with surprising speed:
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DigBI harmonized disparate systems from previous acquisitions and centralized them under HUB’s healthcare platform, Cedar Gate.
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Using Coalesce, we had an initial data pipeline operational within one week.
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What used to take 3–5 hours in ETL jobs now runs in 1–2 minutes.
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Ingesting and transforming unstructured pharmacy data that once would have taken days or weeks now takes just 2 hours.
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We rebuilt the full data warehouse—including four supporting data marts—in about 100 hours.
Key Lessons for Data & Analytics Leaders
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Vision matters — but so does grounding.
HUB’s vision was ambitious, but they tied it to concrete business pain points (reporting cost, data latency). That alignment made buy-in and prioritization feasible.
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Choose flexible, composable tooling.
By combining Snowflake + Coalesce, HUB avoided a monolithic lock-in and gained modularity. The ability to rapidly iterate pipelines was critical.
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Don’t underestimate integration complexity.
Their biggest lift was harmonizing legacy systems across multiple acquisitions. The “last mile” of source integration is where many projects stall.
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Speed builds momentum.
Getting a minimal pipeline live in a week proved viability to stakeholders and unlocked further investment.
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Measure early and often.
The dramatic gains in runtime and manpower created internal champions and allowed reinvestment into higher-value analytics.
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Future enablement, not just fixes.
While efficiency was the first win, the architecture now supports growth into machine learning, generative AI, and domain innovation.
