HCIA - Baltimore, Maryland

Industry - Health Care

Data Warehousing in Health Care

"We were looking at response times measured in weeks. With the new system we're able to generate the same reports in a matter of minutes or hours."

Pete Wagner
Director of Systems and Networks
HCIA

Sun Helps Speed Health-Care Information

HCIA, formerly called Health Care Investment Analysts, made quantum leaps in its ability to respond and is saving millions of dollars at the same time, all by moving from the mainframe based to a recently implemented data warehouse based on Sun Microsystems servers and Informix" software. The company is now in full-scale production with Sun and is braced to grow its one terabyte-plus data warehouse by 500 gigabytes per year. "We'll have something on the order of two terabytes by 1997," says Pete Wagner, HCIA's Director of Systems and Networks.

The warehouse isn't the only thing growing. So have the firm's revenues, at a clip of 20 percent to 25 percent, and a lot of the credit goes to Wagner's staff and HCIA's decision to implement an entirely new architecture for the system upon which the company's business is based: the data warehouse. The warehouse architecture provides ready access to clinical data for the company's Decision Support System and On-Line Analytic Processing activities.

"None of the data was on-line in the mainframe implementation," says Wagner. "Getting a report out meant somebody sitting down and writing a COBOL program, mounting a magnetic tape-you get the picture. We were looking at response times measured in weeks. With the new system we're able to generate the same reports in a matter of minutes or hours."

Increased Performance, Decreased Costs

The choice of Sun and Informix was vital to the program's success. HCIA looked at several hardware vendors but Sun was an easy choice, notably for its implementation of symmetric multiprocessing and its scalability.

"SMP is essential to a data warehouse," Wagner explained, "and in our benchmarks it was clear that only Sun really had it. Several of the vendors didn't even try to compete. Things lined up nicely for us when Informix focused on top-quality support for Sun's SMP implementation. They're a big factor in our success too."

Since HCIA expected their data warehouse to grow at a rate of 100 percent to 150 percent per year, they needed a platform that would scale up to support a large volume of data.

HCIA specializes in selling upon a health care database it has created. The company gathers a wide variety of health care information from hospitals, hospital and medical associations, government, and other sources. It then assembles that information into the data warehouse, where it is accessed to create off-the-shelf and decision support products that it sells to hospitals, integrated delivery systems, employers, pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, and managed care organizations. For instance, a hospital might request a study on how it treats heart attacks compared with how a group of hospitals in another, similar region of the country treats this illness.

"SMP is essential to a data warehouse, and in our benchmarks it was clear that only Sun really had it. Several of the vendors didn't even try to compete. "

Hospitals are interested in subscribing to HCIA because HCIA helps the hospital collect, analyze and produce reports on its clinical data. The director of networking technology said approximately 33 million patients are discharged annually from hospitals in the United States, and HCIA receives data on 23 million, or almost 70 percent. As a spin-off, the company receives permission to add that data to its primary health care database, and to study it in summary form, so long as confidentiality is maintained. If it were to release a report on the reported incidence of AIDS, for instance, HCIA could break figures down by state, region, and often by hospitals, but not by individual patient.

HCIA Solidifies Its Industry Leadership

HCIA's customers have the option of accessing the warehouse themselves, typically using Power Builder on PCs, or taking advantage of HCIA's internal staff of "power users." These experts know clinical data well, and generally employ Informix SQL or 4GL for complete cradle-to-grave major projects.

The warehouse resides on a bank of standard Sun disks. Data management is distributed among the seven servers, with essentially no differences in function among them. Six Informix engines of up to 100 gigabytes each run the warehouse.

Unlike many data warehouse implementations there are no on-line sources of new data. HCIA obtains its data from hospitals and other sources on 9-track magnetic tapes, which are loaded once or twice each week into the system.

A testimony to HCIA's business success was its successful Initial Public Offering in early 1995. With analysts projections of 35% growth in 1996, its position of industry leadership will only solidify further. Much of the credit goes to HCIA's wise choice of Informix for software, Sun for platforms, and data warehousing for a system architecture.