Finding the Needle...

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In order to better serve patients, Boston Medical Center turned to Informatica’s data warehousing solution to integrate its patient care systems.

After years of paying research associates to comb through medical records looking for efficacy data, Boston Medical Center (BMC) is getting ready to take the wraps off a new data integration initiative put in place by Informatica.

The first goal is a laudable one: Improve patient care by discovering the hidden trends in patient care reports. The second goal is also laudable, but more form an managerial perspective: save money on these efforts while boosting the hospital’s potential to secure research grants, and moving the entire hospital closer to an automated center of care.

”We’re very excited by the idea… to be able to better understand the elements of care so we can manage them more effectively,” said BMC’s CIO and vice president, Meg Aranow. ”So this allows us to look at hundreds of thousands of patient records quickly and be able to determine what interventions and practices are yielding the best results.”

After reviewing at least four data integration vendors including Ascential (owned by IBM), Dimensional Insight, Aranow and her team decided Informatica’s solution would best meld with there existing infrastructure of databases (SQL, Oracle, legacy and others) as well as enable them to find the right local talent to make the project work.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant also played a role. Aranow and her team only considered companies in the upper right quadrant: the ”Leaders” quadrant. In the end it was up to the CTO to make the final call.

”He made the call because of this labor force assessment we had done,” said Aranow. ”Informatica appealed more to the technical side and end-user usability.”

This article was first published on CIOupdate.com. To read the full article, click here.