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Featured Case Study
Health Benefit Plans: Enterprise Data Warehouse
| “It’s rare for a project this complicated to run as smoothly as it has.” |
| – Director of Healthcare Informatics |
Client Background: For over a dozen years of its dynamic growth Meritain Health (formerly Performax), one the nation’s leading managers of self-funded health benefit plans, has entrusted Software Consortium with its IT functions.During that period, Software Consortium introduced automation and over the many years of the partnership recommended and developed numerous technology innovations. These technological advances have enabled Meritain to compete with significantly larger insurance firms, so that it now commands a leading role in the industry.
“Many companies loosely use the term ‘partnership’. Software Consortium takes the concept of partnership to its most extreme definition—we experienced their partnership as if it were internal to our company. We never saw them as a vendor, they were integral.” |
| – Keith Sullivan, Performax Founder and CEO |
As the company evolved, our team managed the complexities of a number of acquisitions. The current company was formed through the integration of several existing businesses. With each business came a unique set of applications providing the similar functions of eligibility, claims processing, reporting, billing, among other functions. In order to take advantage of some of the diverse features built into each system it was decided to keep a subset of the systems and not to merge them into a single system. However, the desire to reflect a unified brand and vision to clients, presented the challenge of creating a data warehouse where data from each system could be brought together into one common corporate view. The data warehouse would serve as the single touch point for all client interaction so that a consistent view was presented to the client, regardless of the unique backend system.
Solution Technical Details: Software Consortium was responsible for the Enterprise Data Warehouse architecture, as well as the analysis, design, implementation, deployment and all data modeling. The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) solution was developed on the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform of products. The database was housed on SQL Server 2008 with SQL Server Integration Services being used for the extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) of claims and eligibility from four backend systems, which ranged from off-the-shelf, vendor-customized, to in-house developed. Each system had a unique database and data structure that had to be transformed into a common corporate view. One of the first primary deliverables was high quality, consistent monthly and quarterly reporting packages for each of the clients. SQL Server Reporting Services was utilized for the creation of these reports. With completion of Phase 1, Meritain is already finding their investment is realizing huge savings in labor costs and, equally important, has delivered new competitive advantage.
Benefit to Client: Prior to the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), reporting was a tedious manual process requiring several hours to produce a single report for one client and often involved a two week turnaround. The new data warehouse produces a robust set of comprehensive reports automatically for hundreds of clients in the amount of time it took to previously create one.
“… a tremendous technological advancement in our reporting functionality. The new reporting capabilities completely separate us from our competition. Not only are the reports automated and available much quicker for our clients, but they add a new function of report filtering never offered before to our clients.” |
| – Director of Healthcare Informatics |
With the new Self Service reporting, clients can access reports on an as-needed basis, as well as filter the reports among several parameters and drill into the data to analyze particular segments of their business. The new warehouse provides cost savings while providing a key market differentiator. Upcoming phases of the project call for the inclusion of several more subject areas beyond eligibility and claims data. Also included is the ability to create reports beyond static, structured, production reports and to allow the client to “slice and dice” the information in thousands of ways. These dynamic, interactive, analytical reports will be provided through Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes and the use of SQL Server Analysis Server.
Products/Technologies: SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Analysis Server.
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