Ontada, a McKesson business, is an oncology real-world data and evidence, clinical education and provider of technology business dedicated to transforming the fight against cancer. Core to Ontada’s mission is using real-world data (RWD) and evidence generation to improve patient health outcomes and to accelerate life science research.

To support its mission, Ontada embarked on a journey to migrate its enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from an on-premise Oracle database to Databricks Lakehouse. This move allows Ontada to now consume data from any source, including structured and unstructured data from its own EHR and genomics lab results, and realize faster time to insight. In addition, using the Lakehouse has helped Ontada eliminate data silos, enabling the organization to realize the full potential of RWD – from running traditional descriptive analytics to extracting biomarkers from unstructured data. The session will cover the following topics:

• Oracle to Databricks: migration best practices and lessons learned


• People, process, and tools: expediting innovation while protecting patient information using Unity Catalog


• Getting the most out of the Databricks Lakehouse: from BI to genomics, running all analytics under one platform


• Hyperscale biomarker abstraction: reducing the manual effort needed to extract biomarkers from large unstructured data (medical notes, scanned/faxed documents) using spaCY and John Snow Lab NLP libraries

Join this session to hear how Ontada is transforming RWD to deliver safe and effective cancer treatment.