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CLIENT
INDUSTRY
Health industries
FEATURING
Microsoft Azure
OpenAI
Data and AI
5X
increase in the number of users in just the first two months
10X
increase in the research output with only incremental increases in operating cost
90%+
reduction in response time for press inquiries—from days to hours
PwC helped CareQuest build an AI-driven Health Data Exchange so CareQuest could empower stakeholders with immediate insights
SITUATION
Addressing a fragmented data landscape
CareQuest Institute for Oral Health is a nonprofit with a bold mission to improve the oral health of all by making the system more accessible, equitable, and integrated. Its vision was clear. CareQuest aimed to build a national health data ecosystem where oral, medical, and social data combine to drive equitable outcomes for the long term.
With a rich repository of data spanning all three areas—including oral and medical claims data covering 50 million people—CareQuest was ready to drive real change to improve US health care. But using that data to drive impact at scale was tough.
Every report, policy query, and research study ran through a single team—a lean group of data professionals doing exceptional work inside a system that couldn’t scale. Data ingestion was manual. Datasets weren’t standardized or structured for cross-domain analysis. There was no self-service access for anyone outside the core group. Whether a request came from an internal philanthropy team member or an external policymaker, it hit the same bottleneck.
Meaningfully sparking change would require reengineering the platform, architecture, and access model. Policymakers, researchers, commercial innovators, and internal teams all relied on data to identify disparities in equity and access to care, and to build the evidence base for integrating oral and overall health. Each year, CareQuest generated roughly 50 research studies, supported about six startup validation efforts, and managed a handful of community pilots and collaborations. Leadership knew that pace couldn’t keep up with the opportunity—or the urgency.
SOLUTION
Creating a vision for a trusted data platform
To address this challenge, CareQuest worked to build the Health Data Exchange with help from PwC. PwC has spent a decade helping many organizations modernize with Microsoft Azure—the existing CareQuest platform that would become the foundation for the Exchange. With the help of PwC, CareQuest built the next-generation foundation for its data ecosystem.
The platform connects oral, medical, and social data in one trusted environment, enabling secure, cross-domain analysis and self-service insight generation at scale. Clear data rights give both internal teams and external stakeholders confidence in how the data is shared and used.
But the real shift was operational as much as architectural. PwC supported the delivery model by helping CareQuest move to a center of excellence that leads data governance, security, platform operations, and data science. With self-service access to analytics, dashboards, and curated datasets, users now get the insights they need immediately. The bottleneck is opened. CareQuest is better positioned to scale its impact.
How AI took it further
Using Open AI, PwC and CareQuest worked together on custom GPT-enabled tools that cut across existing research studies and datasets:
AI Research Explorer allows users to query CareQuest’s deep archive of published research in natural language and rapidly obtain synthesized insights with direct links to original source papers.
AI Data Explorer lets users interrogate underlying data sets to perform data analysis independently.
Both tools were built to make data access more intuitive and scalable, giving internal and external users across skill levels a faster path to insight. Previously, this would have required querying the central analytics team—and then waiting, due to the team’s limited capacity.
PwC helped CareQuest build the Health Data Exchange to be sustainable. Cloud spend is tracked consistently and frequently with the right thresholds and monitoring alerts.
RESULTS
Using the data to scale meaningful outcomes
The data is moving. So is the mission—internally and beyond.
Across CareQuest, teams are already putting the Health Data Exchange to work. In the first few weeks, the platform handled more than 1,500 queries across multiple internal functions and teams. CareQuest expects the Exchange to drive a tenfold increase in research impact with only incremental increases in operating costs.
CareQuest’s philanthropy team now uses Medicaid data and AI Research Explorer to help ground grant decisions in real data on coverage, cost, and unmet need. The communications team can respond to media requests with policy-relevant data and equity-focused research—in hours, not days. And the policy and advocacy team can assess proposed Medicaid cuts, identify early signals, and deliver rapid analysis when it matters most.
What once took days of manual processing and capacity delays now takes minutes with AI-enabled self-service.
A clearinghouse for national health data
The momentum extends beyond the organization. Within weeks of external launch, dozens joined the Health Data Exchange—researchers and oral health leaders from top universities, community dental organizations, and policy advocacy organizations.
These stakeholders can directly query research and data using AI for rapid insights or perform in-depth data analysis in the Exchange’s analytic workbench. Because the platform was engineered to evolve, CareQuest can expand it with new datasets and advanced capabilities, including AI-driven clinical notes analysis, multi-dataset exploration, and community water fluoridation dashboards. As many as a dozen new datasets will be onboarded in 2026.
The Exchange also supports new data-driven collaborations. CareQuest is piloting collaborative programs to demonstrate the impact of integrated oral and medical health care—for example, screening for diabetes during dental visits. With the Exchange, CareQuest and its collaborators can share data, analytics and insights in a secure, controlled environment. Up to six such collaborations are planned for 2026 alone.
CareQuest’s internal analytics team is shifting focus from what research to drive internally to how to scale insights across the oral health ecosystem. As datasets expand and collaborations grow, CareQuest is positioned to become a clearinghouse for oral, medical, and social data—leveraging its unique focus on the nexus of these domains to drive a more accessible, equitable, and integrated health care system.
“PwC has been instrumental in building the Health Data Exchange. And the response has been beyond enthusiastic. You don’t usually hear words like fun, exciting, or cool when you’re talking about data programs—but that’s how our users have described their experience with these new AI tools.”
“AI has shifted our role from gatekeepers to enablers of discovery. The Health Data Exchange gives every user instant access to richer, more comprehensive data. PwC has helped us scale insight generation in ways that simply weren’t possible before—and we’re just getting started.”
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