Margaret Kelly
12-12-2014, 01:38 AM
Health Catalyst Collaborates with Microsoft on DataWarehouse and Analytics for Healthcare Industry
SALT LAKE CITY– December 11, 2014 – Today, Health Catalyst announced its work with Microsoft Corp. to collaborate closelyand deploy industry-leading datawarehouse and analytics solutions for the healthcare industry.
Collaboration will be centered around Microsoft’s Analytics Platform System (APS)[/url], which brings together SQL Server and Hadoop data into apre-built appliance, integrated with Health Catalyst’s [url=http://www.healthcatalyst.com/late-binding-data-warehouse-platform]Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and Analytics Platform, a revolutionary approach to managing healthcare data across the continuum of care. The Health Catalyst Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) and Healthcare Analytics platform has been designed specifically for today’s – and tomorrow’s – highly complex and dynamic healthcare data environment. Microsoft SQL Server and APS, with its flexibility and scalability, is integral to Health Catalyst’s mission to help its customers transform healthcare nationwide.
“Health Catalyst is a leader in developing data warehouse and analytics applications to help healthcare organizations achieve better clinical outcomes and research, in less time and for lower costs. There are few other companies in this highly competitive space that come close to its results,” said Bill Hawkins, director of Health and Life Sciences Partners, Microsoft. “With initiatives such as population health management and accountable care continuing to grow in importance, the timing is right. Health Catalyst offers the type of disruptive thinking and deep industry knowledge that fits Microsoft’s vision for the healthcare industry.”
The collaboration encompasses several solutions over the short-term,mid-range and long-term, including:
· Deploying and optimizing Microsoft’s parallel data warehouse architecture (APS) at one of Health Catalyst’s largest client organizations
· Collaborating on the implementation of Health Catalyst’s predictive models, geospatial analytics and natural language processing to assist with population health management (PHM) to improve clinician interactions with technology
· Extending the Health Catalyst Late-Binding architecture and usingPolyBase to combine SQL Server and Microsoft’s Hadoop-based platform
· Deploying Health Catalyst’s de-identified comparative analytics platform,CAFÉ, to Microsoft Azure
· Working together to enhance Atlas, Health Catalyst’s proprietary metadata repository, its white space data entry tool IDEA and its Source Mart Designer, all of which are integrated with the SQL Server product line
Unlike traditional “early-binding” EDWs, which typically require up to 18 months and longer to begin delivering value, Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding platform offers rapid time-to-value – often within a few months, if not weeks, according to the January, 2014 report Healthcare Analytics: Making Sense of the Puzzle Pieces by the respected healthcare research firm KLAS. Rather than binding source data to schemas, business rules and vocabulary when that data is first streamed into the data warehouse (as happens with typical EDWs), data in a Health Catalyst data warehouse is bound as it is needed by the analytic use case. This innovative design ensures that the data retains its original, unchanged and granular form, allowing the data to be constantly repurposed to support a multitude of use cases, providing the flexibility required in an industry where new uses cases and new data sources are constantly being defined.
“Our early bet to base our Late-Binding architecture on SQL Server has played out very well. Microsoft has achieved for data warehousing the same thing that we’ve come to expect from their office productivity suite – incredibly well-integrated, affordable, and highly capable tools,” said Dale Sanders, senior vice president of strategy, Health Catalyst. “From the desktop to the database, the Microsoft SQL Server and APS stack is by far the most efficient, best-integrated and most cost-effective platform in the analytics market today, helping our customers deliver the most cost effective, highest quality healthcare.”
Sanders added: “Microsoft’s scalability has also been clearly demonstrated in a variety of situations, where large organizations manage hundreds of terabytes and tens of thousands of queries per day in their Microsoft-based data warehouses. Microsoft’s PolyBase platform also offers a seamless transition from the world of SQL to the Big Data world of Hadoop, when the scale and data content in our client sites call for that. We have a very ambitious agenda and are excited to formalize our collaboration with Microsoft and bring the depth and breadth of their expertise to our clients.”
About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing and analytics company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes perform the clinical, financial, and operational reporting and analysis needed for population
health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data warehouse(EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in support of more than 30 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Faster and more agile than data warehouses from other industries, the Health Catalyst Late-Binding™ EDW has been heralded by KLAS as a "newer and more effective way to approach EDW." For more information, visit www.healthcatalyst.com, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.