Enabling High-Performance Data Analytics in Healthcare
About the Client
CMA’s Mosaic DART has supported the needs of a leading provider of enterprise analytics and reporting systems to health insurers, provider organizations, and self-insured employers.
Organizations leverage our client’s healthcare business intelligence solutions to review their data—including information on claims, membership, providers, and utilization analyses. They subsequently gain a competitive advantage through timely, data-driven decisions that benefit bottom lines and support strategic goals.
Business Case
In 2015, CMA’s client became increasingly concerned about the costs of using a legacy Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) for the healthcare analytics platforms they provided to over 175 customers. Additionally, the effort to administer the hundreds of associated OLAP databases was becoming increasingly problematic. They needed to address increases in data volume, user workload, and the number of customers who also stressed their hardware and software foundation’s analytical processing capabilities.
To improve the currency and business value of the information to their clients and successfully execute such an extensive migration effort promptly, our client decided to look hard at the data movement technologies, homegrown and COTS, used to refresh the analytical sandboxes.
There is a magnitude of risk to implement such comprehensive changes in healthcare analytics’s technology underpinnings. But our client understood that a strategic IT initiative was necessary to support planned growth in their analytics capabilities and to continue success and profit in healthcare analytics’s crowded and competitive field.
The Solution
Our client developed a comprehensive plan to evaluate other best-of-breed options in the RDBMS and data movement tool markets. This plan included having vendors of products under evaluation conduct proof of concepts at the client’s site, using their technologies and the source data used to refresh their analytical sandboxes.
Our client made a thorough evaluation of market choices, using criteria such as cost, performance, and ease of use. They selected HP Vertica(Hewlett Packard’s MPP database) and CMA‘s Mosaic DART (patent-pending, formerly known as the Data Ingestion Suite). These solutions provided a path to the Big Data analytics critical to the client’s continued growth and success.
The Results
With CMA’s Mosaic DART, the client was able to reduce data extraction, transport, and refresh times in aggregate by up to 90% from times achieved by proof of concepts.
Specifically, the client could refresh a Vertica-based analytical database designed for one of its large clients with over 1.4 TB of operational source data in two hours. This is in stark comparison to the 15-20 hours that the other two data movement products under evaluation took to achieve an identical refresh.
This performance measure is critical to our client’s time-sensitive migration to Vertica as the new relational database foundation. Strong healthcare analytics capabilities are the lifeblood of the client’s organization. Mosaic DART’s functionality and the decreased load times have enabled the client to refresh hundreds of client-specific analytical databases on a more frequent basis, dramatically increasing the business value of the information provided to its customers.