Major industries from retail to aeronautics are leveraging big data. But despite the abundance of data in healthcare, and the clear promise of big-data analytics, the sector has been slow to put it to work. Among the obstacles to adoption are laws aimed at protecting patient information, and a shortage of technical talent; hospitals and clinics compete for big data engineers whose technical skills can be agnostically applied across industries. Nonetheless, in 2015 Geisinger Health System implemented an IT system called a Unified Data Architecture (UDA) which allowed us to integrate big data into our existing data analytics and management systems.