SAN DIEGO -- InterSystems Corporation today announced that Providence Health & Services (PHS) has gone live with an enterprise data warehouse built on its Ensemble universal integration platform. The integration project, which highlights the growing trend of leveraging a wide range of data sources to enable optimal healthcare decision-making, was rolled out in January. InterSystems made the announcement at HIMSS 2006 in San Diego, Calif.
The leading database provider in healthcare, InterSystems develops and markets the CACHE post-relational database and Ensemble universal integration platform.
With more than 45,000 employees, PHS operates acute care facilities, freestanding long term care facilities, and low income and assisted living facilities across a five-state area in the Pacific Northwest. Ensemble is being used to integrate information flowing from 12 systems that include 30 data repositories located in Everett, Olympia and Centralia in Washington. The integrated data feeds the Horizon Performance Management (HPM) data warehouse from McKesson Corporation.
Strategic Goals Require Technology Innovation
The integration initiative is expected to have a far-reaching impact on future business strategy at PHS. It supports standard cost accounting and service line analysis across the region, enables elimination of two legacy decision support systems and provides a single source of information for strategic decision-making.
Ensemble's rapid integration and development functionality was key to the success of the data warehouse initiative. Ensemble provides an innovative, unified graphical, XML and code-based development environment that accelerates modeling and automating business processes for business analysts and technical developers. Ensemble also facilitates smooth communication. As a result, PHS business analysts were able to rapidly spec out the interfaces and work easily with the software developers and the result was faster integration and development.
High performance was another technology requirement for the complex integration project. From a hospital acute setting, more than 400,000 encounter records will be streaming into the warehouse annually. In addition, more than 1.5 million encounter records will flow in from more than 150 physicians' locations and clinics, providing concrete evidence that Ensemble's ability to deliver the high performance needed to manage massive data volumes was important to the success of this project. Complementing Ensemble's advanced functionality was the service and support provided by InterSystems throughout the project. "We are absolutely committed to our customers' success. Our focus on providing top-level service and support illustrates that commitment," said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems Vice President of Strategic Planning.
Future Plans
It is expected that the information from this Ensemble-based data warehouse will be used to, in effect, predict the future for PHS. By integrating clinical, financial and operational data across multiple patient data dimensions, the organization gains the ability to understand its business in ways that will help predict strategies that are most appropriate for the future.
"The success of this project clearly shows why PHS is recognized as an innovator in the healthcare technology arena," said Grabscheid. "The decision to fully utilize data from multiple clinical and financial repositories by using Ensemble to provide an integrated information flow to the HPM warehouse provides them with powerful decision support capabilities that will prove extremely useful in the increasingly competitive healthcare market. It's been a real pleasure to partner with PHS on this integration project."
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