Sam VanNorman and Zheng Zhu recently represented R1 at the Databricks Global Strategy Council in San Francisco. This council comprises a select group of senior technology leaders, elected by Databricks’ leadership, for their strategic partnership and industry standing. We appreciate Databricks’ thoughtful invitation to our team members and acknowledgement of our impactful, lasting partnership.
Forging a Stronger Path Forward Together:
Connecting with the senior leaders of Databricks’ product and engineering organizations was an excellent opportunity to strengthen the relationship between our teams. We discussed the direction around and vision for some of their key product offerings like Unity Catalog, Spark, LakeFlow, and Agent Bricks. We look forward to continuing to collaborate closely with the Databricks team to provide additional feedback on opportunities and features that can help immediately accelerate the work we’re doing today at R1, within the R37 AI Lab and beyond.
Databricks Unveils Exciting Developments, Offering New Opportunities for R1:
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi highlighted exciting announcements, many of which are very relevant to our data strategy and R37 core product development:
- Open Formats/No Lock-In. There will be a continued focus on open data formats, including avoiding vendor lock-in. This will allow us to seamlessly integrate our data capabilities with key vendors/partners of our choice, such as Palantir for R37 and Snowflake for our analytics workloads. We will be able to more effectively share data and scale with these open standards in place.
- Unified Governance. Databricks is extending governance beyond access control to cost, lineage and quality. This will help reduce risk and accelerate data access without compromising control and will help R1 improve our organizational data observability.
- Lakebase. This is the first fully managed, serverless Postgres database integrated within the Lakehouse platform that will enable transactional (OLTP) and analytics workloads in one place. It will have branching support of multi-petabyte data sets, include bidirectional sync with low latency and will support R1’s AI development for its customers with its flexibility, reliability and advanced features.
- Agent Bricks. These are tools that will help us create and evaluate AI agents – they will support custom evaluations, RLHF, model monitoring and governance. Advancements to support AI Agents complement our data science initiatives where we leverage Azure, Databricks and Palantir Foundry.
Increased Confidence in R1’s Data + AI Journey:
R1’s technology teams feel even more energized that we are on the right path. R1’s leadership recognizes the importance and value of leading-edge data capabilities coupled with AI-native platforms to improve the value we bring to our health system clients and the patients they serve.
“The energy at the conference was tremendous, and we’re excited to continue tackling the toughest challenges in healthcare revenue cycle management ,” added Zhu.
