New Zealand's Orion Health has poached Peter McCallum, the former head of data and insights at Spark's data solutions company Qrious, to head up its Auckland-based analytics team as part of the company's push into precision medicine and big data.

Orion Health is embarking on a hiring program to build its analytics capability, with Mr McCallum calling for software engineers with experience in Apache Spark, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Java, Scala, Python or R to get in touch.