Reduced claim cancellations through real-time data processing
Cut data warehouse costs by 25% with serverless BigQuery
Gained two hours of weekly productivity per data analyst
Deployed eight AI services enabling real-time patient insights
Instant product recommendations with AI Sales Assistant
Switzerland's leading health insurer transforms from 24-hour data cycles to real-time analytics, enabling faster business decisions and better insights.
Switzerland's leading health insurer transforms from 24-hour data cycles to real-time analytics, enabling faster business decisions and better insights.
Legacy systems couldn't keep pace with modern healthcare demands
Sanitas, one of Switzerland's largest health insurers with over 850,000 customers and CHF 3 billion in annual premiums, faced a critical challenge by 2023. Their 19-year-old Oracle data warehouse was creating significant delays in an industry where speed directly impacts customer service.
The problems were compounding rapidly across multiple dimensions. Critical healthcare analytics required 24-hour batch processing cycles, which meant that claims decisions, fraud detection, and customer insights were always a day behind. With data volumes exceeding 2 billion records, the system was unable to scale to meet the growing demands. Development teams spent weeks provisioning new environments through external vendors, while rigid architecture prevented integration with modern AI and analytics tools that could transform their business operations.
The operational challenges were particularly acute for Sanitas' seasonal insurance business.
Our weekend load always ran almost 24 hours. We were actually too slow to extract the insights from our data or use them properly.
Gabriel Eyyi
Lead Development (DataOps/MLOps), Sanitas
The company had to over-provision its on-premises infrastructure to handle peak autumn loads, resulting in expensive unused capacity for 70% of the year. When weekend data processing runs failed, Monday mornings became crisis management exercises as teams scrambled to provide management with current business metrics. Every change request was expensive and time-consuming to implement, creating a bottleneck that hindered the organization's ability to respond quickly to market opportunities.
Most critically, the delays were impacting customer service and business agility. The legacy system's batch processing meant that critical business insights were always a day behind, preventing rapid response to market opportunities or operational issues. Marketing campaigns couldn't leverage fresh customer data, sales teams lacked real-time upselling insights, and fraud detection systems analyzed patterns retrospectively rather than preventing problems proactively. For a company committed to being "number one for customer convenience," these technical constraints directly contradicted their mission.
A real-time analytics platform for AI-powered insights
In early 2023, Sanitas partnered with Google Cloud and ipt to completely reimagine their data infrastructure using BigQuery as the foundation for a modern lakehouse architecture. The strategic partnership with ipt proved crucial, enabling a mixed-team approach where ipt consultants integrated directly with Sanitas' internal teams for solution design and architecture development. This collaborative model ensured that healthcare-specific compliance requirements and technical innovations were seamlessly integrated from day one.
Table clones are a really cool feature that allows you to clone objects in BigQuery without actually having to copy the data. That's why it's lightweight, fast, and doesn't cost extra.
Andy Langner
Principal Architect, ipt
The technical implementation follows a sophisticated medallion architecture with four layers designed for healthcare data governance. Raw data flows through Cloud Datastream and Confluent Kafka for real-time ingestion, while Cloud Composer orchestrates complex data pipelines. For data transformations, the team implemented dbt (Data Build Tool) to facilitate seamless integration with their GitLab-based development workflows, thereby bringing software engineering best practices, such as testing, CI/CD, and version control, to data warehouse development. Dataplex provides intelligent governance across the entire data landscape.
One of the most innovative features is BigQuery's table cloning capability, which enables developers to create isolated sandbox environments instantly. Unlike traditional database copies, which duplicate data and incur storage costs, table clones create lightweight references to the original data. Each developer can work with a complete production dataset copy within minutes, paying only for changes they make rather than the entire dataset. This innovation eliminates the traditional bottlenecks that occur when development teams interfere with each other's work, enabling actual parallel development with real production data.
The results in daily operations are transformative across all user types. Claims processing analysts access real-time data for immediate decisions, marketing teams create targeted campaigns using self-service dashboards, and customer service representatives have instant access to comprehensive customer histories. The modern platform enabled Sanitas to deploy eight production-ready AI services, including their Sales Assistant built with Vertex AI, which provides instant product recommendations and price calculations from screenshots or documents. The "Relevant Offer" system uses machine learning to deliver personalized recommendations directly within its CRM system, enabling customer advisors to receive real-time, data-driven insights during consultations.
Partnership success drives platform transformation and business impact
The transformation's success stemmed from strategic partnerships combining Google Cloud's technology with specialized expertise. Working as integrated mixed-teams with Sanitas' internal developers, ipt brought critical healthcare data expertise and modern software engineering practices to data warehouse development, including comprehensive CI/CD pipelines and innovative use of BigQuery's table cloning for isolated development environments. This partnership model became essential for addressing the fundamental cultural shift required: transforming traditional data warehouse practices with modern software engineering methodologies that emphasize modular code development, metadata-driven automation, and continuous integration practices.
The technical foundation addresses a critical challenge for seasonal insurance business through BigQuery's serverless architecture, which eliminates the need to over-provision infrastructure for peak autumn loads while automatically scaling resources based on actual demand. This dynamic scaling capability directly translates to the 25% cost reduction Sanitas achieved, as it transitions from fixed on-premises costs to variable cloud consumption that aligns with its seasonal business patterns.
A critical compliance advantage comes from their metadata-driven approach, where all data classifications, access permissions, and usage purposes are coded into the platform's metadata layer, providing complete transparency and auditability.
Without a well-designed data platform, digitalization remains superficial. With the Sanitas Data Platform, we have created the foundation that makes true innovation possible.
Elias Frühauf
CIO, Sanitas
Dataplex ensures intelligent data management and governance across its data lake and warehouse, automatically tracking which data can be used for what purposes and enabling seamless audits for Swiss healthcare regulators. The integration of Gemini within BigQuery further optimizes analytical workflows, opening new possibilities for predictive modeling while maintaining the explainable AI principles that healthcare professionals require.
The project achieved remarkable execution metrics that demonstrate true partnership success: a CHF 5 million budget was delivered on time and within scope, zero downtime occurred during the production go-live in April 2025, only 18 months after the project was launched. 3,138 Oracle tables were migrated seamlessly, with business logic transformation handled by infrastructure partner Valtech. Beyond technical metrics, the platform established a proper platform mindset rather than simply replacing their data warehouse, enabling different business domains to develop data solutions while maintaining governance standards independently.
With over 850,000 customers, Sanitas is one of the largest health insurers in Switzerland.
Industry: Insurance
Location: Switzerland
Products: BigQuery, Cloud Datastream, Dataplex, Cloud Composer, Vertex AI, Gemini
About Google Cloud partner — ipt
ipt builds secure, modern IT platforms and apps that drive innovation and business value.
