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Following a different pattern
Sometimes the unexpected move is the
one
that leads to victory.
by C.C. Williams
 nnovate
or die. This is one of the unforgiving rules that govern the dog-eat-dog
world of business, where profits determine success and competition
drives innovation. And, increasingly, innovation doesn't just
mean jumping on the latest strategy or technology to drive productivity
and growth. Successful companies use existing technology in new,
smarter ways to stay ahead of the game.
Take data warehousing, for example. Since being
formally introduced in the late 1980s, data warehousing has been
a godsend for most corporations, which use it to cut costs, boost
productivity and keep in touch with customers. The most ardent
and savvy users of data warehousing have typically been financial
businesses and retailers such as Wal-Mart, which has built the
largest discount retailing operation in the world due, in large
part, to its ability to quickly respond to the ever- changing,
diverse tastes of its customers.
But these days, data warehousing is rapidly
expanding far beyond such traditional uses and is now regularly
employed in new, eye-opening ways by a diverse group of organizations.
The cost of data warehousing technology has dropped significantly,
driving its popularity among non-profit groups and smaller government
agencies. As Baseline Consulting Group's Managing Partner Evan
Levy puts it, "Data warehousing is being deployed to the masses."
Well, maybe not quite yet. But perhaps it's
true that you no longer have to have a Wal-Mart-sized budget to
get Wal-Mart-style results from data warehousing. Ask these three
organizations that have turned to Teradata for their data warehousing
solution: Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a major New England health
plan that uses data warehousing to detect illness trends; the
United States Department of Agriculture, which uses it to root
out crop insurance fraud; and Windber, Pa.-based Windber Research
Institute, which is using it to combat cancer.
Despite their differing technical needs and
expectations in terms of access tools and numbers of users, choosing
Teradata was the best decision for all thanks to the solution's
proven scalability, total cost of ownership and performance capabilities.
Another winning advantage? Peace of mind. For
example, it's been three years of smooth sailing for Michael Cross
and his Teradata Warehouse. "We've had zero downtime because of
maintenance problems," marvels Cross, whose firm Planning Systems
Inc. developed a data warehouse system for the USDA. "Once we
got the system built as we like it, it pretty much manages all
the internal workings itself."
For some, data warehousing is a can't-miss marketing
tool. Besides the vital task of helping researchers detect cancer,
Windber sees its Teradata Warehouse as a centerpiece of a state-of-the-art
alternative medicine hospital and research facility that should
attract world-class scientists. "If we have the right computing
system, we could be in Iceland, we could be in Antarctica, we
could be anywhere in the world and make this happen," says Nicholas
Jacobs, president of Windber Medical Center and Windber Research
Institute. "I wanted (Windber) to be as much like Disney World
for scientists as possible."
And that's the true advantage of data warehousing:
It's making dreams of success come true for companies large and
small.
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Ralph Miller, Director Corporate Information Management, for Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare (HPHC)
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In
the box
Teradata
Warehouse powered by:
Teradata Database V2R5,
6 node MPP 5300 NCR Server (production); 2 node MPP
4980 NCR Server (test/disaster recovery); SMP 4470
NCR Server (dev.)
Storage:
EMC
Operating
System: UNIX MP-RAS
Teradata
Utilities: FastLoad, MultiLoad, FastExport
Tools/Apps.:
Teradata Warehouse Miner, products from Information
Builders, Cognos, SAS
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Tracking fundamentals
Four years ago, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC), the oldest
nonprofit health plan in New England serving about 760,000 members,
lay on its financial sick bed, having fallen into receivership.
Now the Wellesley, Mass.-based health plan is the picture of good
health, with growing profits and a robust membership. HPHC is
also the only health plan ranked among the top 10 in quality of
care and member satisfaction in a 2003 industry survey.
The Teradata Warehouse, along with other initiatives,
is part of HPHC's strategy of being "brilliant at the basics,"
according to Deborah Norton, senior vice president and HPHC's
chief information officer.
For HPHC, one of the basics is using the Teradata
Warehouse to track the development of diseases and illnesses such
as asthma and diabetes among its members. Each time a member goes
to the doctor, the visit is coded and details of the member's
condition are fed into the system. Keeping an electronic pulse
on members' health enables HPHC to take quick action to ward off
serious problems. At-risk patients get calls from case managers
and receive mailings from HPHC filled with recommendations on
how to manage a particular disease.
"The data warehouse is used to support various
disease management programs, including asthma, diabetes, women's
health and cardiovascular diseases," explains Ralph Miller, HPHC's
director of corporate information management. "We've been able
to improve the overall health of our membership in an extremely
cost effective manner." The system is also useful for tracking
the spread of illness and analyzing its causes.
HPHC deployed its Teradata system in February
2003. In addition to drastically improved performance, migrating
from IBM to Teradata will enable HPHC's network of about 20,000
physicians and 120 hospitals to access valuable information on
the Teradata system. HPHC is also experimenting with Teradata
Warehouse Miner and other related applications.
"In terms of improved performance and response
time, we feel we have gone to warp speed," explains Norton. "The
data warehouse load process has been dramatically shortened. Queries
and reports that once took hours to run (or never finished) now
take minutes or even seconds. " Furthermore, she notes, "from
a data-quality enhancement area, we were able to automate a number
of our data-checking parameters so that we now know the quality
of the data."
The project has had a very healthy ROI and will
save HPHC millions of dollars in software and hardware maintenance
costs over the life of the investment, according to Miller. Such
return on investment is great medicine for any company, and it's
helped Harvard Pilgrim stay in the black and keep its members
in the pink.
Detecting fraud
Fraud and abuse in any business directly impacts the bottom line,
and when it happens with Federal Crop Insurance, the bottom line
is our tax dollars. Some estimate that up to 15% of the billions
of dollars paid out annually in benefits are fraudulent, abusive
or wasteful, and the schemes are becoming more difficult to detect.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Risk Management
Agency oversees the Federal Crop Insurance program, which, in
cooperation with private insurance providers, annually provides
600,000 farmers and ranchers with $33 billion in protection against
lost crops and poor yields. For years, the department has relied
mainly on a rather unsophisticated rumor mill-complaints from
neighbors-to catch fraudulent claims. It's a method that's about
as efficient as using a butter knife to cut an acre of corn.
For all intents and purposes, fraud investigations
in any industry are pretty much a manual operation, according
to Michael Cross, director of data mining operations and data
warehousing for Planning Systems Inc. (PSI), a high-tech company
in Reston, Va., that provides information technology services
to government and commercial clients.
The USDA's original crop insurance database
wasn't much better. Its design was meant for accounting, not compliance
or data mining. The system stored each year's data separately,
making it almost impossible to perform multi-year data analysis
to detect behavioral patterns, according to Bert Little, executive
director of the Center for Agribusiness Excellence.
Three years ago, the Center, a collaboration
between PSI and Tarleton State University, received a research
grant from the USDA to use data warehousing and data mining techniques
to tackle fraud, waste and abuse in the system. They turned to
Teradata. "We wanted a very large, very fast system," says Cross.
"We wanted to have at least 10 years of data,
all stored contiguously in a single database and data structure
… we also wanted it as maintenance-free as possible." They were
impressed with Teradata's success with other government agencies
such as the U.S. Air Force and hoped for similar success with
the USDA.
Cross and Little have since doubled the size
of the Teradata Warehouse to four nodes, and they now pack it
with 14 years of crop insurance and related data.
The system holds every policy sold under the
Federal Crop Insurance program since 1991, along with hundreds
of millions of ancillary records ranging from actuarials to weather.
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Bert Little, left, of the Center for
Agribusiness Excellence and Mike Cross of Planning Systems
Inc.
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In
the box
Teradata
Warehouse powered by:
Teradata Database V2R5, 4 node 4850 NCR Server/4855
NCR Server
Storage:
2.88 TB
Operating
System: UNIX MP-RAS
Teradata
Utilities: Teradata Tools and Utilities 7.0
Tools/Apps.:
products from Business Objects
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"We can run through millions and millions of
records and get results back in seconds," Cross and Little say
with pride. "The Teradata solution has had very little overhead;
it's insanely fast and just keeps getting faster." In the works:
geographic information systems and satellite imagery that will
enable Cross and investigators to use remote sensing and imaging
techniques to determine the health of a crop planted anywhere
in the country. That's one high-tech claims validation system.
Information gathered from such futuristic techniques,
along with data currently in the Teradata Warehouse, are used
daily at the Center for Agribusiness Excellence to develop and
run scenarios that identify potential fraud, waste and abuse.
A simple example (at least to Little and Cross)
is identifying producers who file claims year after year, simply
to cover their premium costs. Using the Teradata Warehouse and
their proven expertise, Cross, Little and other investigators
can retrieve, process and analyze information about 1 million
producers, 13 million policies, $220 billion worth of liability
insurance and $16.5 billion of indemnity paid for the last seven
years-and get results in under 15 minutes.
Even more complicated is yield switching, when
farmers move production from one or more fields to others. One
year they claim one field at a loss and receive insurance payment;
they then switch production to another field the following year.
Cross plowed through four million records, basically writing 23
pages of SQL code to provide the model to detect this scheme.
The Center for Agribusiness Excellence and the
Teradata Warehouse have yielded results where it counts. They
have saved the Federal Crop Insurance program more than $160 million
in the last two years-not a bad harvest in any line of business.
Integrating research
Being the president of a tiny hospital and research center in
the small Pennsylvania town of Windber, doesn't stop F. Nicholas
Jacobs from thinking big-or creatively. Jacobs, who used to be
a professional trumpet player for such road shows as the Ice Capades
and is now President of Windber Medical Center and Windber Research
Institute, gives patients at his 82-bed, 150-physician hospital
the royal treatment. Aroma therapists and spiritual counselors
visit patients, who bathe in Jacuzzi tubs and prepare meals in
private kitchens.
Jacobs' plan for the 3-year-old Windber Research
Institute is equally grand: to create the first integrated biomedical
data warehouse to help find a cure for cancer and cardiovascular
disease. Researchers at the institute combine clinical information
with volumes of scientific data about genes and proteins to help
pinpoint the cause of diseases.
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Dr. Michael Liebman (left) and F. Nicholas Jacobs
of the Windber Research Institute.
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In
the box
Teradata
Warehouse powered by:
Teradata Database V2R5, 4475 NCR Server
Storage:
720 GB
Operating
System: UNIX MP-RAS
Teradata
Utilities: Teradata Tools and Utilities 7.0
Tools/Apps.:
products from Spotfire, Inc.
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The massive database will collect as much as
50 TB of data every nine months from various sources, including
research centers in Europe and Japan. On any given day there are
20 different software packages feeding into this repository, according
to Jacobs.
For instance, the center receives tissue samples
from the Windber Hospital and the U.S. Army Walter Reed Medical
Center.
Each tissue biopsy provides 450 fields of information
about the person's health and lifestyle, such as whether the person
drank three glasses of wine a day or lived in an urban area. Each
biopsy also adds 166 MB of data to the system, which uses analysis
tools from Amersham Biosciences, Informax and Spotfire to enable
researchers to "see the data in multiple dimensions and manipulate
it on the screen," explains Dr. Michael Liebman, Windber's chief
scientific officer.
Doctors and researchers from around the world
will be able to access the data, benefiting from and building
on the work of others and breaking down barriers between disciplines.
The system combines demographic, molecular and
clinical data to create individualized medicines and vaccines-all
working toward a goal of minimizing the need for invasive diagnostic
procedures.
"The Ph.D.s are interacting with the M.D.s,
the pathologists are talking to the surgeons, the surgeons are
talking to the proteomic specialists," says Jacobs. "What we're
talking about here is the next level of medicine, the ability
to get away from the cutting and the irradiating."
Why do medications work for some patients and
not others? What's happening at the molecular level? "Those are
the kind of nuances we'll be able to sort with this database,"
says Jacobs, who knows firsthand the pain of losing a loved one.
His father succumbed to cancer at the age of 58.
Launched one year ago, Windber's Teradata Warehouse
could develop into one of the largest data warehouses in the world.
With the ability to look at 10,000 samples a year, the capacity
is infinite.
"Teradata has always been open to allowing us
to create something that's completely new and to do it in a manner
that we believe is going to do the ultimate, which is cure people,"
says Jacobs. T
C.C. Williams is a New York-based writer
who has covered business, finance and technology for Barron's,
nyse magazine and Sky.
PHOTO BY (MILLER) AARON ELK, (LITTLE/CROSS) DAN BRYANT, (LIEBMAN/JACOBS) WIN PIX
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