Product descriptions:
Real Chemistry, a global partner to the world's most innovative life sciences and healthcare companies, was looking to scale access to advanced AI capabilities. Their data scientists were building sophisticated models for healthcare analytics, such as understanding patient journeys for rare disease, and needed to cut prototyping timelines and enable non-technical experts to leverage these capabilities without significant technical support. By adopting the Databricks platform with Databricks Apps, Real Chemistry reduced proof-of-concept development to days, while empowering analysts to self-serve AI-powered insights.
Building healthcare innovation on unified data and AI
Real Chemistry drives the commercial success of healthcare companies. This includes creating AI-powered, idea-driven audience analyses centered on the customer's specific needs. The company's analytics group builds advanced AI models that identify undiagnosed patients with rare diseases, analyze social media data to understand complete patient journeys, and measure ad campaign effectiveness across pharmaceutical companies.
Andy Johnson, Chief Information Officer at Real Chemistry, shared that while it's easy to say that innovation is vital to an organization, achieving it isn't always easy. "Anyone can say innovation is important. The harder part is operationalizing it in a way that's repeatable and meaningful. That's why close partnerships with the best vendors matters." Johnson emphasized that "Databricks has helped Real Chemistry reduce the grunt work and allowed our team to focus more on their craft."
Real Chemistry adopted the Databricks platform approximately three years ago. The decision was driven by a strategic focus: enabling AI engineers and data scientists to concentrate on solving unique client problems with data, rather than building time-intensive platform infrastructure. By integrating all data into Databricks with Delta Lake for reliable storage and Unity Catalog for unified governance, Real Chemistry eliminated time-consuming manual connections between disparate data sources. "Once we put all our data together inside Databricks, it became accessible for everybody, and we could expand how the data was used, producing results faster than before," said Rocket Williams, SVP of Technology at Real Chemistry.
However, a critical challenge remained: providing non-technical subject matter experts — such as marketing professionals and business analysts — with access to complex AI workflows. Before Databricks Apps, building custom applications required a dedicated team to manage full-stack development and application hosting infrastructure, taking an average of six months to a year per application.
Democratizing AI with rapid app development
Once Real Chemistry's AI engineering team heard about the launch of Databricks Apps, they embraced it to provide self-service AI access across the entire company. The data science team led early prototyping using Agent Bricks to build intelligent applications that handle information extraction, data analysis, and transform unstructured data into structured insights.
The impact was immediate. Williams highlighted a telling example: "A recent hire was able to build production-level applications within three months. She had never touched the platform before joining us and now she's producing high-level analysis within months of joining Real Chemistry."
Their most popular application provides analysts with an "easy button" — an operational interface to access data agents built with Agent Bricks. "We do a lot of agentic work around information extraction and data annotation," explained Helene Brashear, VP of AI Engineering at Real Chemistry. "Agent Bricks lets us build data agents that help our team bring data to the platform with a menu of common agents to choose from."
Unity Catalog provides a strong governance foundation that propagates access controls across all workloads and agentic applications, ensuring security requirements are met. Williams detailed how agents manage data aggregation while ensuring de-identification: "Thanks to Unity Catalog, we are able to provide secure, self-service access to enriched data that analysts would never be allowed to view directly, due to strict privacy and security controls." Another breakthrough use case, HealthGEO, analyzes what multiple large language models say about Real Chemistry's customers and products, evaluating content and sentiment. Brashear noted the scope of what was built: "That includes data ingestion, scalability, NLP, an analytics pipeline, plus data agent work — all working behind a custom frontend."
Accelerating delivery and expanding healthcare access
The results have fundamentally changed Real Chemistry's operations. Development time for production workflows like HealthGEO dropped significantly. Recent proofs of concept now launch for testing within a week, enabling rapid iteration or pivoting as needed. Real Chemistry is rolling out several solutions leveraging Databricks Apps to over 200 users across the organization.
By consolidating data infrastructure on Databricks, Real Chemistry achieved greater efficiency while improving accessibility. Data scientists now build patient journeys leveraging qualitative and quantitative data, understanding barriers and successes through data mining. "We can help somebody get healthcare they may not have gotten, especially for rare and orphan diseases," Williams said.
The platform's integrated capabilities span the analytics lifecycle: Unity Catalog provides centralized governance with fine-grained access controls ensuring healthcare privacy compliance, the lakehouse delivers reliable storage for petabytes of healthcare data, Agent Bricks enables the fast creation of production-ready agents, and Databricks Apps brings everything together within applications with easy-to-use interfaces for technical and non-technical users alike.
Looking forward, Real Chemistry envisions analysts accessing all data and AI through a single interface functioning as an "ultimate multi-tool." Brashear expressed excitement for the next generation: "I see fantastic potential in replacing the wizard approach with conversational, multi-agent supervision that guides users through processes and launches workflows as needed." Williams summarized the transformation: "We've built all these capabilities, and as we make them available through apps, our analysts spend less time on manual complexity and can focus on delivering the strategic insights our clients depend on."