June 10 ,2026- Every industry has its own unique challenges. The Databricks Customer Awards Industry winners are the organizations that didn’t just face theirs — they used data and AI to solve them.

The Industry Awards recognize one standout organization from each sector: the company whose work best demonstrates how data intelligence can drive breakthrough results, reshape operations and create new possibilities within their field. From a global bank unifying risk and finance data across regions to a hospital transforming how clinical data is ingested and reused, this year’s winners show just how broad and deep that impact can be.

This year’s program recognizes 10 winners spanning financial services, communications, health and life sciences, manufacturing, retail and CPG, energy and utilities, enterprise technology, public sector, digital-native businesses and excellence in cybersecurity. Together, they represent some of the most inventive and impactful uses of Databricks we’ve seen — and we’re thrilled to celebrate each of them.

Health and Life Sciences Industry Award:Hospital for Special Surgery

Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) is the world’s leading academic medical center focused on musculoskeletal health. For 16 consecutive years, it has been ranked #1 in orthopedics in the U.S. by U.S. News & World Report — a distinction that reflects sustained excellence across clinical care, research and innovation.

Building on this foundation of leadership and impact, in June 2025, HSS launched an ambitious enterprise data transformation journey: to design and implement a modern data lakehouse on Databricks within an 18-month timeframe. The objective was not incremental improvement, but structural change, unifying a highly fragmented data ecosystem, strengthening governance at scale and enabling faster, more reliable decision-making across the enterprise.

Rather than following a traditional use case-driven data ingestion model, HSS adopted a fundamentally different strategy — full system ingestion. In practice, this required ingesting source systems in their entirety, rather than selectively extracting subsets of data tied to individual use cases. ERP, HRIS, EHR, PACS and other source systems were brought in as complete datasets, preserving fidelity, context and enabling reuse across multiple downstream applications without re-ingestion or re-engineering.

This approach introduced meaningful upfront complexity. Requiring deeper coordination with system owners, rigorous data modeling and stronger governance controls from day one. However, it established a scalable foundation. New analytics use cases can now be delivered rapidly without revisiting ingestion patterns or re-modeling data, significantly reducing time-to-insight and technical redundancy.

In just 10 months, HSS had ingested 40+ source systems, established 14,500+ production tables and 130+ schemas, and delivered a growing set of data products and applications.

More importantly, the transformation has shifted the operating model for how data is delivered across the enterprise. Teams can now move from question to insight using reliable, governed datasets, enabling not just faster delivery, but more sophisticated analytics, functionality and deeper insight generation. It is this step-change in both capability and execution that distinguishes this transformation and underpins the program’s recognition as an industry-leading data initiative.