As a leading portfolio medical technology company, Smith+Nephew serves global healthcare providers across orthopedics, sports medicine, ENT, and advanced wound management. It adopts a technology-led approach to deliver healthcare outcomes to help patients live life, no holds barred.
Smith+Nephew partnered with Persistent to facilitate the intake and consolidation of data from multiple sources to be fed into third-party systems that Smith+Nephew can refer to better forecast demand, manage inventory and streamline shipping.
In collaboration with Smith+Nephew, Persistent developed an AWS-backed data intake architecture on Snowflake to map future surgery schedules.
Persistent develops an AWS-powered Snowflake-based Data Intake Platform
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we worked with Smith+Nephew’s Digital Health data platform team to set up an AWS-based Snowflake environment to facilitate the intake, consolidation, and transfer of data inputs from multiple source systems. We designed a data pipeline, collaborating in Agile sprints with Smith+Nephew’s cloud team and the vendor of the inventory management platform. This enabled a consolidated view of data required to better forecast demand based on advanced surgery scheduling.
Since this data contained surgical case details, it was governed by stringent security and privacy laws, such as Protected Health Information and Personally Identifiable Information. In the design and implementation stages, we worked closely with Smith+Nephew’s legal, data privacy, and information security teams to institute security measures. We set up appropriate Identity Access Management and rules-based access control for user authentication and authorization policies. AWS’ private protocols govern the communication between Snowflake and AWS within the company’s network, ensuring it is not publicly accessible.
To maintain consistent security standards for the further use of this data, we established procedures, documentation, and guidelines for the healthcare data platform team to follow. Additionally, our data platform and security teams collaborated to integrate Snowflake with Sentinel, allowing real-time log audits.
Improved forecasting and automated data inputs lead to enhanced productivity.
- Improved surgical lead times
- Manual consolidation efforts eliminated with automated data inputs leading to improved productivity
- Timely access to accurate, critical surgical case data
It’s been a long and complicated road to get here, but this is a genuine game-changing moment for S+N and how we interact with our customers. Congratulations to you and the team on a job very well done.
James Fullarton, Vice President-IT, Smith+Nephew
