The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) has been named the best data warehouse site for 1998 by The Data Warehousing Institute. The award was granded to BCBSA as part of the 1998 Best Practices in Data Warehousing Awards Competition, hosted by The Data Warehousing Institute. The specific data warehouse was BCBSA`s Federal Employees Programme. The Red Brick Warehouse and Brio front-end query tool were the two core technologies used in the data warehouse: Red Brick for the data warehouse engine and enterprise business intelligence products from Brio. Red Brick is represented by Software Futures and Brio by Abraxas Technologies. The health care provider`s ability to meet and sustain its business objectives while reducing costs and improving services were the key determiners in earning the award. Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP`s data warehouse was chosen above other leading data warehouse solutions for its innovative architectural design and successful implementation as the way to meet the goals of the corporation and individual business units. This data warehousing architecture has enabled BCBSA to reduce its cost of ownership through optimal resource management, and to increase the quality and accuracy of its business decision-making. "Our focus on choosing the right partners for success in data warehousing at Blue Cross Blue Shield has enabled us to meet our business objectives and lower our costs," says Raymond Pyle, MD and CIO at Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP. "This award underscores the importance of these objectives in today`s decision support market. We`re very pleased to be recognised for achieving best practices and hope our achievement will help others in their data warehousing endeavours." "We`re delighted to be recognised as a part of the solution Blue Cross Blue Shield chose to satisfy its critical business requirements," says Anthony W Layzell, senior VP of sales and marketing at Red Brick. "We are committed to being a long-term partner with Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP towards its success as a healthcare benefits provider. We believe Ray Pyle and Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP are visionary in their market and this award is deserved." "At Brio, our goal is to provide powerful, yet easy-to-use products that enable the rapid implementation of business intelligence across the enterprise," says Chris M Grejtak, executive VP of marketing for Brio. "We are thrilled that Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employees Program has been recognised with this important industry accolade and to join with Red Brick in providing a winning solution." The Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP Data Warehouse Architecture BCBSA FEP processes 250 000 health claims a day and 1,9m contracts a year in its business to market Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance coverage to federal employees. FEP is responsible for efficiently designing and managing programmes that meet federal employee needs for traditional healthcare and managed care services. FEP manages these services nationwide and serves as the Blue Cross Blue Shield single point of contact for contracting with the US government. Today, health care organisations have recognised that it`s much more beneficial and less costly to create and maintain health than it is to fix broken health. In order for BCBSA FEP to be a successful contributor in creating that kind of healthcare environment, it must analyse volumes of historical data on millions of members to discover; for example, which procedures worked best or what variation exists in treatment of specific diseases from one geographical location to another. BCBSA FEP is focused on providing analysis of this information to BCBSA Plans, physicians and other providers in order to help them improve outcomes from treatment and overall patient health. BCBSA FEP`s architecture was based on two ideals: 1) Operations and decision support are two technical environments, each with its own performance requirements, user needs and life cycle; and 2) Its decision support environment required high performance and Web connectivity. By separating these environments, BCBSA FEP could design and improve both areas independently, creating best-of-breed solutions that would assure operational integrity at high volumes. BCBSA developed its decision support environment to provide access to detailed data, to perform queries in both scheduled and real time and to provide intuitive and cost-effective access for its multiple users in regional offices nationwide. BCBSA chose Red Brick as the cornerstone of its analysis environment for its data loading, versatility, query performance and standard interface which encouraged open partnerships with leading tools and application vendors. BrioQuery, BCBSA`s query tool, enables analysts to do ad hoc queries in realtime, in a Web-based environment, and provides scheduling capability with delivery via e-mail for large reports. The awards The Data Warehousing Institute, the leading voice in education in the data warehousing industry, hosts an annual "Best Practices in Data Warehousing Awards Competition" to provide thousands of practitioners with best practices they can follow as data warehousing continues to make its transition from early adoption to mass proliferation. Winners are judged on clearly being able to demonstrate their data warehouse projects are innovative, solve common problems faced by data warehousing practitioners, could be followed by others, and result in large, measurable impacts on the business success of their organisation.
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