Zephyr Health Powers Big Data for Life Sciences with Neo Technology’s Graph Database

Neo4j Transforms Zephyr Health Users Into Data Scientists

SAN MATEO, Calif. – January 14, 2014 –Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced that Zephyr Health, a fast-growing big data analytics platform for companies in the life sciences industry, is using Neo4j to power its high-speed, scalable platform that turns data into actionable information. Neo4j enables Zephyr Health users to be ‘their own data scientist’ with the ability to discover new connections between data from disparate sources with a graph database that can rapidly adapt to a changing business.

“There is a revolution happening in big data analytics, creating demand for business users to be their own data scientist,” said Brian Roy, director of platform engineering and architecture at Zephyr Health. “In development of the Zephyr analytics platform, we found Neo4j to be the best open solution that met our needs, offering flexibility, scalability and a viable community committed to creating the building blocks that accelerate our business.”

Zephyr Health uses Neo4j to enable its cloud-based Zephyr analytics platform, providing graph analytics across a diversity of data. The Zephyr analytics platform allows pharmaceutical makers, medical device manufacturers, and other health care customers, to discover unique connections across their data that can advance their R&D, clinical trials, and marketing. For instance, Zephyr’s engine helps pharmaceutical companies find the right doctors for a clinical trial by linking private and public data–such as specialty, geography, and clinical trial history.

Zephyr Health Builds a Powerful Cloud Analytics Platform Using Neo4j

Zephyr Health’s vision was to create a platform that would unify data in a way that could provide customers with deep insights into the dynamics of a given market. For this, Zephyr needed to combine a wealth of data from both its customers and from public sources of information. It then needed to build an application capable of querying this complex mélange of multi-sourced data. Two factors caused Zephyr to look beyond traditional database technologies for its solution. First was the real-time analytic component: making sense of connections across these diverse sets of data in real time. The second was the diverse and changing nature of their data, for example with data from doctor’s surveys, which caused new attributes to come in regularly.

Zephyr solved this problem by storing the connected data in a Neo4j graph, and exposing it to business users via its own domain query language. In a week or two of development the Zephyr team was up and running with data on millions of physicians and hospitals. The company is now seeing its customer base and data volumes grow exponentially. The Zephyr analytics platform is running faster than expected and meeting and exceeding market demands.

“Graph databases are effective for every industry we know of– from telco and financial services, to logistics and hospitality, to online dating and health care. The success that Zephyr Health has seen with Neo4j underscores the transformative business power that results when graphs are made available to everyone,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology.

To download a case study highlighting Zephyr Health’s use of Neo4j, please visit: https://neo4j.com/users/zephyr-health/