The Customer

Zelis is a healthcare technology company streamlining the business of care. By connecting payers, providers, and patients through innovative payment and data platforms, Zelis helps make healthcare more affordable and transparent.

Within Zelis, ZEDI (Zelis, Engineering, Data & Infrastructure) is a centralized data team that partners across business units to unlock the value of data through intelligence and AI solutions. Their mission: to deliver reliable, compliant data pipelines that keep the healthcare system running smoothly.

The Challenge

Before adopting Astronomer, Zelis managed Airflow internally—balancing heavy compliance requirements with a growing engineering footprint. Upgrades were complex, version management was inconsistent, and onboarding new developers often meant losing an entire day to environment setup.

At the same time, Zelis needed to maintain strict control over its data. With large volumes of PHI and PII governed under HIPAA, any movement of data outside the organization's infrastructure required careful consideration.

The company needed a solution that would modernize orchestration without compromising its security and compliance posture.

The Solution

Zelis chose Astronomer's on-premises Airflow platform, Astro Private Cloud, which provides the highest levels of privacy for sensitive data, ensuring all data processing remains securely within the company's infrastructure. The solution offers the control of self-hosted Airflow with the reliability and scalability of managed orchestration.

Using Astronomer, Zelis orchestrates data pipelines across Snowflake, SQL Server, and Postgres, automating the transfer, transformation, and reporting of healthcare data. Astronomer also powers backend processing for internal applications, triggering long-running jobs and returning real-time status updates to web services.

One critical use case involves Machine-Readable Files (MRFs) under the Transparency in Coverage Act, which require hospitals and insurers to publish pricing data publicly. Astronomer now handles the acquisition, storage, and parsing of thousands of MRF JSON files each month, automatically extracting metadata and loading it into databases for analysis and compliance. "We process thousands of files per month," Steven says. "Astronomer queues them up, downloads, parses, and loads the data into our databases—it's all automated now."

The Results

By deploying Astro Private Cloud, Zelis modernized its orchestration environment while maintaining total data control. Key outcomes include:

• Faster setup and testing: Engineers can spin up local environments in minutes instead of hours with astro dev start. The engineering team saves 3,000 hours annually setting up environments, allowing more focus on development and innovation. "It used to take all day to get an environment running. With Astronomer, engineers can start building DAGs right away instead of troubleshooting setup issues."
• Simplified deployments and environment flexibility: Flexible deployment management and the ability for developers to mirror production conditions locally make it easy to move from dev to production while increasing consistency and confidence. "Testing used to take hours. Now we can move seamlessly between stages," says Steven.
• Simplified version upgrades: Airflow updates and deployments are managed more easily, ensuring the team stays current without disruptions. "The ability to upgrade and change Airflow versions through the Astronomer UI saves so much time," says Steven.
• Role-based flexibility: Teams have precise access control through built-in RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and can manage deployments independently. "RBAC gives each team control over their workflows without compromising security," Steven explains.
• Proven scalability: Airflow orchestrates 200+ DAGs, moving millions of healthcare records across hundreds of warehouses and marts. "Airflow has scaled with us as we've grown," Steven says. "It's reliable and consistent across all our systems."

What's Next

Zelis is preparing to upgrade to Airflow 3, which enables Remote Execution—a key capability that will define the company's next phase of orchestration. With Airflow 3, Zelis can separate compute from orchestration, improving scalability and resource management.

With Astronomer, Zelis has proven that healthcare organizations can be both secure and modern—delivering compliant, high-performing data infrastructure that keeps pace with innovation.