Case Study
Conversational AI data analytics dashboard democratizes data from days to minutes at leading U.S. health insurance company
OUR CLIENT
Founded more than a century ago, this company has evolved into a leading health insurance payer, offering plans for medical, dental, and pharmacy care to nearly 50 million people. The company also provides additional services in the health IT sector to help companies better manage medical ecosystems and control rising costs.
THE CHALLENGE
Reducing backlog for healthcare business intelligence
The insurance company maintains large volumes of structured healthcare data in BigQuery, Google Cloud Platform’s serverless enterprise data warehouse. Business users, such as underwriters and care management teams, often require access to data for reporting and analytics purposes. However, the data team couldn’t keep pace with user demand for data insights. People usually waited as many as ten days for claims data and provider insights—crucial information for making timely, critical business decisions. These issues caused the data analytics backlog:
- Dependence on a small, overburdened technical team—When business users didn’t have SQL knowledge, they relied entirely on a small data team to clarify requests, craft SQL queries, generate reports, and visualize results. This bottleneck became a major contributor to slow data processing times. It also became a single point of failure for critical reporting needs.
- Inefficient resource utilization—Technical data management personnel spent time responding to routine data queries rather than focusing on high-value data engineering initiatives.
- Data security concerns—Although business users needed access to claims and provider data to perform their jobs and make informed decisions, ensuring secure, controlled, role-based access was of paramount importance. Therefore, the data management team had become the gatekeeper to make sure business users received information appropriate to their access level.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Empowering non-technical business users with an AI-driven data analytics dashboard
UST designed and implemented a conversational AI dashboarding tool that integrates NLP with a SQL pipeline, allowing business users to query information without writing complex SQL queries. The implementation followed a focused Agile methodology, delivering measurable progress through clear milestones—all within a streamlined 90-day timeline. The solution provides business users with easier access to data and accelerates business intelligence (BI) analytics cycles. The innovative solution offers:
- Real-time data access and AI processing—An agentic stack orchestrates a BigQuery data warehouse with Google’s Gemini LLM, so that query results, reports, and analytical insights always reflect the most current data.
- A conversational interface—Users input natural language questions, as if they are talking to a colleague. This self-service analytics functionality eliminates the need for SQL expertise.
- Contextual query retention—Users can easily ask follow-up questions without repeating themselves since the solution maintains the conversation.
- SQL editing capabilities—Transparent SQL allows advanced users to view, edit, and refine SQL statements, unlike most black-box AI solutions, where users can’t see or understand SQL queries.
- Optimized queries and data models—Queries are tuned for healthcare terminology and use company-specific data models to improve data retrieval efficiency, minimize compute resources, and speed query response cycles.
- Self-learning capabilities—The solution is designed to improve over time as more people generate reports and analyze data, retaining successful queries and insights.
- A visualization engine—The solution automatically selects the appropriate charts, tables, or graphs to display data or export to a PDF. Business users no longer need to request technical assistance to interpret data, boosting overall productivity.
- Robust security and improved compliance—The governance model provides end-to-end security with role-based data access, automatic sensitive-data masking, and comprehensive audit logging, ensuring adherence to stringent healthcare data access regulations.
THE IMPACT
Generating data insights in minutes instead of days
The successful conversational AI solution has been a game-changer for the health insurance company, enabling faster access to trusted insights. It’s delivered these impressive benefits:
- Remarkable acceleration of insights—Query and report requests that used to take days now take minutes.
- Enhanced data utilization—This data democratization initiative has provided broader access to information and insights across the organization.
- Increased productivity—Self-service data access enables business users to generate reports and data insights without relying on the data management team. Meanwhile, technical personnel are free to focus on higher-value initiatives rather than responding to routine report requests.
- A data-driven culture—By lowering barriers to information access and boosting confidence in data accuracy, employees have shifted to a more analytical approach to decision-making.
- Improved regulatory compliance and governance—The data access controls and audit logs help ensure adherence to HIPAA healthcare data regulations.
- Stronger competitive positioning—Faster access to reliable data insights helps drive quicker responses to market changes.
Does your company want to make data more accessible with a conversational AI solution? Our technology experts can help you leverage the power of AI to establish a data-driven culture within your organization. Learn more here.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/alpha-ai