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. We use the UDA’s big data capabilities to track and analyze patient outcomes, to correlate their genomic sequences with clinical care, and to visualize healthcare data across cohorts of patients and networks of providers. Geisinger’s UDA is the largest practical application of point-of-care big data in healthcare, with thousands of CPUs processing and delivering hundreds of terabytes of data every hour.