Informatica Announces Data Integration Marketplace

Like Salesforce’s AppExchange for cloud computing, the idea behind the data integration marketplace is to enable its large community of developers and partners to share information and products such as mapplets, vertical solutions and connectors.

“This is a place where we can bring together the 52,000 developers in our community and allow them to showcase their wares,” said Tony Young, CIO at Informatica.

To ensure quality control, initially Informatica will be vetting what goes onto the marketplace to check code is viable. But once Marketplace is more established, it hopes to introduce certification programme and to adopt a peer review process with a start rating calibrating the success of the product and any documentation that goes with it.

“One of the unique things we’re doing is creating a marketplace for buyers to post what they want from sellers, such as a connection to an innocuous system that is not readily used by many people. People can go out and work on that for you,” said Young.

It is also an open platform and the products traded may not specifically be related to Informatica. The company is not aiming to make money from the venture, but hopes that creating an open platform for discussion among customers, partners and developers will provide useful feedback on future product directions and strategy.
The beta version is up and running now.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s expertise in Informatica covers a variety of databases and integration software enabling us to deliver Informatica solutions across different platforms.

View Systech’s Informatica Technology Practice

http://www.systechusa.com/informatica/

Healthcare IT is Transforming from Supporting Administrative Processes to Supporting Patient Care, Survey Says

Inadequate focus on reliable IT infrastructures will hobble healthcare organizations’ efforts to automate critical operations to improve patient care while cutting costs, according to a commissioned study of 102 U.S. healthcare IT professionals conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Stratus Technologies. Server Availability Trends in the Time of Electronic Health Records: What the Move to Paperless Medical Records Means for Server Reliability finds that, despite debate on the rate of growth or barriers to adoption, EHRs are growing and here to stay. This is transforming the role of IT — and the IT organization — from supporting administrative processes to supporting patient care.

Policy makers, patient advocates and healthcare companies themselves agree that electronic patient records and care management systems will improve treatment by reducing error rates and costly duplication. A focus on front-end applications and the handheld devices they run on, however, has overshadowed the server and network layers of the IT infrastructure, where the critical data processing and retrieval will occur, the study said. Without highly reliable server infrastructures, patient information systems are likely to perform poorly and lead to frustrated medical personnel, lower quality care and lost revenues.

Although healthcare IT professionals are aware of their needs at the server and network levels, they face scant financial and staff resources for meeting them. “Healthcare IT professionals face significant challenges in maintaining server availability,” according to the study’s findings. “And the impact on the delivery of care and operations of the hospital or physician practice were significant, ranging from overtaxed and disgruntled medical staff to delays in patient care. Availability has become an imperative, yet health care IT professionals struggle to meet the challenge,” the study said.

The survey recommends a three-pronged strategy for developing a durable, reliable server infrastructure:
• Assess your entire server portfolio and identify critical and key points of failure that impact care. Identify the function and the process role of each server and assign a rating to the impact of a failure.
• Develop a strategy for server availability around a solid set of tools that minimize the cost impact.
• Align with a vendor that understands health care’s requirements for availability. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents felt that having a server vendor that understood the health care sector’s unique needs was a critically important factor to them.
“Between the focus on health care at the national level and the federal funds available, there may never be a better time for healthcare organizations to convert to electronic healthcare records,” said Karen Ramirez, Stratus healthcare sales executive. “They have a lot of anxiety about how to do it correctly and within their means. With the right combination of forethought, planning and product selection, healthcare IT can provide the reliability and performance that patient healthcare applications need to deliver cost savings and better quality care.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Gartner Identifies Four Information Management Roles IT Departments Need to Remain Effective for 2010

Gartner, Inc. has identified four information-management roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team in a major trend that will affect both IT and business.

“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and as result traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department,” said Debra Logan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The future of IT lies outside the IT department. Increasingly CIOs are coming from “the business” and “users” are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.” By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that 40 percent of people who report into IT in a matrixed fashion or directly will have substantial business and non-IT experience.

Organizations need staff with different skills from the ones they were originally hired for. These are not IT people as organizations know them. “Staying relevant in this changing environment will require a new way of thinking about organizational models and staffing in IT projects,” added Ms Logan. The four job roles that IT will need to support within the business or within IT are:

Legal and IT Hybrids
Gartner predicts that 20 percent of Global 2000 companies will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, up from less than 5 percent in 2005. Legal and IT hybrids create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments. Organizations can fulfill the role by retraining security professionals in law or giving legal professionals some IT training.

“IT leaders with responsibility for information management have been in a stalemate for more than five years over what to do about legacy information, how long information should be kept, and what the legal precedent is for doing so,” said Ms Logan. “The lawyers won’t tell companies what to do, but they won’t listen to anyone but other lawyers. The records managers want to implement retention schedules as they did in the paper world, and IT departments just want someone to tell them what to do with all the e-mail that is bringing their exchange servers to their knees and all the personal folders clogging the storage devices.”

Digital Archivists
Digital archivists will be required to appraise arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes. Gartner expects around 15 percent of companies to add a digital-archivist role by 2012 compared with fewer than 1 percent in 2009. Suitable candidates can be found in library and information science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers.

“Organizations typically have vast quantities of records, which require specialist expertise to access, appraise and preserve,” said Ms Logan. “This isn’t a job for conscientious users to perform if they have time; it requires training and expertise. If you have never heard of persistent uniform resource locators (PURLs), don’t know what PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is and are unaware that there are reasons why Portable Document Format (PDF) is not a suitable preservation format for e-mail, you need a digital curator.”

Business Information Managers
Twenty percent of business managers rated the information that they get from IT as poor, according to the Gartner Business Pulse survey conducted from June through August 2009*. “Information management has never been an explicit job role: IT manages the technology, business manages the domain, but who manages the information?” said Ms Logan. “Companies have allowed a huge gap to open up, and consequently, everyone has been the manager of their own information.”

There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a “business and IT partnership” with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 percent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 percent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 percent in 2009.

Enterprise Information Architects
Within IT itself, enterprise information architects will be required to create taxonomies, document templates and data models. Gartner has observed several additional roles within the title of information architect, which has developed to include a mix of skills to enable both structured and unstructured content to be managed effectively. In some cases, the same person may fill more than one information architecture role, such as business-level information architect, data-integration architect, application-oriented information architect and content-oriented information architect. All these roles focus on adding structure and context to data so that the data can be leveraged to increase its value and maximise efficiency and reuse.

“Despite difficult economic conditions and disruptive technology, business and demographic trends, IT organizations have not changed their priorities or behaviors,” said Ms Logan. “If IT responds the way it always has, IT operations face obsolescence. The role of technology will now be to augment human contributions, rather than automate them. The only way to manage information better is to manage information better with people.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Healthcare delivery in the United States has been undergoing major changes. Move towards Market driven healthcare, internal and external restructuring of healthcare delivery systems and increasing sophistication of information technology are all key drivers for accelerating the pace of change in recent years.

All players in the Healthcare value chain – Patients, Providers and Payers are impacted by these forces. Today healthcare faces additional challenges, of escalating pharmaceutical costs, labor shortages, questions surrounding quality of care, compliance with regulations (such as HIPPA).

In this paper, we will primarily focus on the issues relevant to Health Provider Organizations and how BI technology and analytics would meet the challenges of regulations, privacy and data volume of healthcare.

Introduction

According to Health Leaders, a health industry publication, more than 150 Provider Organizations across the United States have gone bankrupt or closed in the past ten years due to financial instability. Many more will meet the same fate unless steps are taken immediately to get a better handle on financial performance and improve operational efficiency substantially.

Healthcare Value Chain

To meet the challenges and to ensure the long-term viability, Provider organizations require well-designed, efficient, and integrated clinical, administrative, and financial processes, and the ability to make “informed” decisions. The key to designing effective and efficient processes and to making sound decisions is the availability of high quality, integrated information delivered when and where it is needed, in a manner useful to knowledge workers, decision makers, and healthcare consumers.

Opportunities for cost savings in US Healthcare Industry ($ billion)

Business Intelligence systems can help Provider Organizations face these challenges

To proactively and more effectively manage information, the provider organizations require a more comprehensive framework – system and processes, than the traditional IT systems. We believe the answer is Business Intelligence. The Gartner group defines Business Intelligence as the process of transforming data into information, and through discovery, transforming that information into actionable knowledge. Thus BI is not a specific technology, or a single data warehouse, or a single analytical application. Business Intelligence is the process that is supported by people, information, and technology for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization.

We have outlined a Business Intelligence Framework for Provider Organizations. BI systems will enable provider organization track utilization, monitor costs and revenue, and develop and live within fixed budgets. Reports and analysis from the business intelligence system will help identify cost trends, patterns and abnormalities and pinpoint financial weak spots. Leadership is then empowered with the knowledge and information to directly influence the performance and bottom line of the organization. A recent survey of senior executives from Healthcare Organizations revealed that Business intelligence systems are primarily used in financial analysis, but increasingly assisting in clinical research, performance measurement, physician profiling and other clinical and operational analyses

Business Intelligence Framework

What are Business Intelligence systems used for in your organization?

• Financial Analysis
• Operational Analysis
• Budgeting
• Cost Accounting
• Clinical Research
• Program Development
• Market Research & Analysis
• Disease Management
• Case Management
• Clinical Reengineering
• Physician Profiling
• Supply Chain Management
• Analytical Customer Relationship Management
• Physician Profiling
• Performance Management
• Case Management
• Operational Analysis
• Budgeting
• Market Research
• Clinical Reengineering
• Customer care Analysis
• Protocol development
• Risk Management

We will outline below some key areas where Business Intelligence systems will provide direct impact in improving financial and operational performance.

Negotiating Adequate Capitation Rates

Often health plans give physician organizations a monthly per-member fee (capitation fee) for providing care for their members. Health plans also delegate to these groups the responsibility of spending the money, deciding on care, and making payments to physician members. Some industry experts believe that root of provider organizations failure is inadequate capitation rates set by health plans. But, many provider organizations lack the information needed to pinpoint this issue and negotiate better terms with health plans.

Business Intelligence solutions with complete financial and operational data and analytic capabilities can help these organizations to understand the level of contracting and capitation rates at which they will achieve desirable economies of scale and profitability. This will empower the management to negotiate appropriate contract terms with health plans.

Controlling Operational Costs

With escalating healthcare costs, it’s important for provider organizations to understand their flow of expenses and how to control them. Prescription drug prices have gone through double-digit percent increases; Health professionals are in short supply and substantial increases in salary, benefits and bonuses are needed to lure and retain them. Administration of complex health plan contracts necessitates high overhead and administrative costs.

In this environment, it’s more important than ever for provider organizations to monitor their costs closely. Business Intelligence systems will enable the organization to track cost patterns over time and identify areas for reduction for controlling the budget. This is a vital part of financial management and if handled inappropriately, the organization can quickly become financially over extended.

Curtailing Unnecessary Losses

Provider organizations must protect themselves from unnecessary losses, such as treating patients not covered by their group or health plans and having extensive out-of-network referrals to specialists. This cost could be substantial and usually have to be absorbed by provider organizations. Streamlining authorizations, eliminating duplicate claims and preventing treatment of ineligible patients can help save the provider groups large amount of unnecessary losses.

Here again Business Intelligence system will help identify the extent of these losses and bring management attention to these issues. It will help identify the risk group of patients based on historical data and predictive analysis. It can track physicians who are likely to refer out-of-network specialists extensively and allow management to take needed action.

Sharing the Risk with Health Plans (Payers)

Health Plans also realize that their success depends on the survival of well-run provider organizations. Whenever provider organizations go bankrupt and close, all the players in the value chain – patients, physicians, insurers and regulators are all affected as they scramble to ensure the delivery of care. This is a costly proposition to Health Plans. Hence, Health Plans and Managed Care organizations are always concerned about long-term viability of the Provider Organizations that they deal with. They are willing to share the risk with provider groups that have a proven track record of success with these risk-based contracts. They are more committed to paying actuarially sound rates that reflect the actual costs of care to these provider organizations.

A provider organization, with a sound business intelligence system and analytical capabilities that can track costs and control budgets, has a better chance of gaining confidence and trust from health plans, which in turn, paves the way for sharing the risk with them. As a result, provider organization can negotiate better terms and lower the overall financial risk to the organization.

Providing Incentives for High Performers

For the provider organization to succeed, it must motivate individual provider members to control costs and improve on utilization while achieving quality outcomes and high levels of patient satisfaction. How can an organization achieve this objective? It must develop appropriate incentive programs and provide a financial stake to the physicians in improving care, quality, and outcomes while controlling costs. The compensation plan should be structured to encourage physician behaviors that ultimately achieve the organization’s objectives and allow for members to be liable for the same risks as the organization.

Without a properly defined data repository with historical data and analytical system, organizations will be unable to track physician performances over time to implement such a compensation plan. Business intelligence system will provide the data required and the tools needed to analyze and develop appropriate incentive plans and help track the adherence of these plans by individual members.

Alert System for Early Detection of Financial Risks

The recent sudden failures of many provider organizations have shown that these groups did not have early warning system to detect potential risks and take immediate measures. Through business intelligence system, set of key performance measures and metrics could be tracked over time and reported periodically to the CFO and other senior management. These reports could be sent automatically to the designated management members and alerts can be triggered if performance metrics fall below certain threshold values.

Tracking Clinical Outcomes of Different Treatments

We have primarily focused so far on the key financial and operational efficiency improvements that could be achieved by health provider organizations in rapid time frame with the implementation of a sound business intelligence system. But the value of this system is not limited to the financial performance alone. Business Intelligence systems can also help track clinical outcome of different treatment options through historical patient record analysis and provide physicians with the means to better understand the effectiveness of these treatment options. Although treating any one patient will involve a unique combination of complex decisions, aggregating patient populations and examining variations in physician decision-making will yield valuable insights for practitioners.

Customer Relationship Management

The government and patients are demanding that health providers create and improve internal systems to provide better service, minimize errors and improve clinical outcomes. Patients are pushing back at provider systems for accurate and comprehensive record keeping. A healthcare system overwrought with inconsistencies and errors can prevent even the best organization from developing strong relationship with its patients. A business Intelligence system that integrates patient data across the enterprise and make it available at the point-of-service will help provider organizations to improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes- the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

Spending on information technology has been historically low in the healthcare industry and especially so with provider organizations. But, as we noted earlier, provider organizations are facing great challenges than ever before now. Status-qua will only speed up reaching financial dire straits sooner. Provider organizations need to act quickly and invest in appropriate information technology that can immediately help them in identifying financial weak spots and implementing cost control measures. Business Intelligence System has proven to be the key enabling technology that will take all the raw data that is collected in these organizations and turn them into actionable information to empower the leadership to directly influence the bottom-line of the organization.

MicroStrategy Introduces MicroStrategy 9

MicroStrategy Incorporated introduced MicroStrategy 9 at its annual user conference in Las Vegas. MicroStrategy 9, the company’s most significant release in nearly a decade, is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2009 and will include significant new products and enhancements to its BI software platform.

“Organizations have a mix of enterprise-grade and departmental BI applications. Enterprise BI applications continue to advance in data scale, user scale, and analytical requirements and MicroStrategy 9 includes new, advanced features to improve the performance, scale, and efficiency of large-scale enterprise BI applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “In addition, MicroStrategy 9 also includes innovative features to enable the rapid development of departmental BI applications by business users rather than IT professionals. To support consolidation and standardization, MicroStrategy 9 eases the migration of departmental BI application data and metadata into a unified, enterprise BI environment.”

As BI systems grow to thousands of users and hundreds of terabytes of data, maintaining fast query performance can be a tremendous challenge. MicroStrategy 9 includes new adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP and improvements in SQL generation to enhance query performance.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces a major new architectural component called “In-memory ROLAP” to dramatically improve query performance. In-memory ROLAP takes advantage of the large addressable memory now available on 64-bit Unix, Linux, and Windows computer servers, and provides a performance-optimized middle-tier database that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. Since the new middle-tier database is stored in computer memory, it avoids disk access delays. In-memory ROLAP can serve the data needed for the most complex and time-consuming queries, dramatically improving the average query response times. In-memory ROLAP can also offload work from database servers, freeing up database capacity and allowing enterprises potentially to delay purchasing additional database capacity.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces SQL generation algorithm optimizations for handling sophisticated analyses involving complex metrics. The new optimization algorithm can reduce the number of SQL passes by 66% and reduce database query time by as much as 75%. This new capability works transparently with reports, dashboards, and analyses, providing an immediate performance improvement to many existing MicroStrategy applications.

Successful BI systems often experience dramatic growth in user populations. It is increasingly common for a single enterprise BI installation to support thousands and even tens of thousands of business users.

MicroStrategy 9 includes significant architectural components and features that allow it to efficiently support the specific needs of smaller-scale BI systems for departments and workgroups.

Healthcare Providers Building a Smarter Healthcare System with IBM

IBM recently announced several hospitals and healthcare providers that are collaborating with IBM to help build a smarter healthcare system for ensuring patient safety, improving efficiency and reducing medical errors through electronic medical records (EMR).

Reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care through innovative systems for handling patient records is a major priority in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, calling for $19 billion in grants and incentives for practices to invest in health IT. IBM is helping more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide integrate and access new intelligence, making EMR become smarter with open technology. The healthcare systems are built on IBM open technology for integrating and managing medical data, as well as business intelligence tools for gaining new insight. The technology can also be used for medical personnel that can now have instant access to pertinent information to respond more quickly to patient requirements.

“Now is an important time for industry leaders to step up and contribute to healthcare reform and transformation. To accelerate achievement of such goals, IBM is teaming with our many business partners, alliances and key clients to drive the creation of integrated delivery systems, including electronic medical records, that help the worldwide healthcare system become more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent,” said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry. “In this regard, the enablement of EMRs as envisioned by the Obama Administration will help to link diagnosis, drug discovery and healthcare delivery systems to insurers, employers, communities and patients themselves.”

The recently announced healthcare providers collaborating with IBM include:

• Memorial Hermann Hospital System
• Capella Healthcare
• Trillium Health Centre
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Oracle BI Upgrade Focuses On Public Sector

The new functionality within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1 provides public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

Oracle has added new capabilities for public sector agencies in the financial analytics component of the vendor’s business intelligence suite.

The new functionality is within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1, which was introduced Monday. The features provide public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

In addition, the upgrade is better able to detect exceptions through improved monitoring of budget spending, and offers more real-time information to support trend analysis and decision-making on issues.

To make deployment of the software easier, Oracle has added pre-built integration with the financial module of version 11.5.10 of the company’s suite of business applications, called E-Business Suite. In addition, there are extensions to the Oracle BI Applications data warehouse schema and metadata layer to support public sector content.

The vendor has also added extraction, transformation and load maps to pull data from the Oracle Financials module of the E-Business Suite, and had included pre-built dashboards and reports for the public sector.

“Oracle BI Applications can be deployed quickly to enable public sector agencies to achieve rapid return on investment,” Paul Rodwick, VP of product management for Oracle, said in a statement.

Besides government agencies, Oracle BI applications are available for a variety of business operations, including sales, customer service, marketing, financials, supply chain, human resources and order management, procurement and spend. Specialized industry analytics are also available.

Oracle’s latest release followed less than a week after the introduction of an upgrade of the Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion, a financial modeling application that helps executives understand the financial impact of alternative corporate strategies.

Edition R11 includes integration with Oracle Crystal Ball, a spreadsheet-based application for predictive modeling, forecasting and Monte Carlo simulation. “Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance R11 allows analysts to improve their forecasts by using Crystal Ball’s simulation capabilities in their financial models and better understand the risk factors impacting their business,” Bill Guilmart, Oracle VP of product management, said in a statement.

Other new integration features allow for automated sourcing from systems like general ledgers, budgeting and consolidations. The capabilities make it possible to drill back to the source system, providing an audit trail.

The Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion application is part of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system.