SAS addresses new storage demands in healthcare industry

Quality data storage has long been a top priority of IT managers in healthcare organisations, as they struggle to ensure the timely, reliable collection of data.

However, the increasing complexity of the healthcare environment and the growing importance of business and analytic intelligence applications have placed new demands on IT departments.

"The last decade brought many changes to the healthcare industry, as rapid growth as well as frequent mergers and acquisitions among healthcare providers became commonplace," says Corey Springett, business development manager, SAS Institute, SA.

"An inevitable by-product of these consolidations has been the proliferation of isolated islands of information that serve separate business units and reside on multiple data storage systems and platforms."

Meanwhile, the need for decision-makers to have direct access to a unified view of the organisation's information has intensified. They need this single version of the truth to make effective, reliable decisions.

"But the business and analytic intelligence applications that have emerged to meet that need have begun to strain traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs)," says Springett.

"These systems were not designed to meet today's demands. For example, they lack the capabilities for searching vast tables of information to unearth small pieces of user-requested data. They cannot produce the summarised reports demanded by modern business intelligence applications or handle the intensive simulation and modelling requirements of advanced analytic intelligence applications."

As the sheer volume of enterprise data has grown exponentially along with the sophistication of applications that use that data, the limits of traditional RDBMSs have become increasingly apparent. Performance problems are common, which in turn has raised ownership and maintenance costs.

To meet performance and reporting requirements, IT departments for healthcare organisations need a dedicated storage platform designed to disseminate information efficiently and reliably for both business intelligence and analytic intelligence applications.

The solution must also be easy to administer and fully open to third-party exploitation tools.

SAS Intelligent Storage is a dedicated platform designed to disseminate information efficiently for business intelligence and analytic intelligence applications, from SAS or third-parties. It offers numerous storage options, including relational and OLAP. An open, integrated metadata framework enables these storage options to be provided transparently to a wide range of applications and environments.

SAS Intelligent Storage gives IT managers new ways of servicing multiple applications that require access to data in many different forms, all without upsetting enterprise data collection strategies.

The solution is one of five integrated elements that comprise the SAS Intelligence Value Chain, a framework that integrates individual technology components within an existing healthcare infrastructure. Other elements include SAS Business Intelligence and SAS Enterprise, Transform and Load (ETLQ).

The former is a sophisticated business intelligence solution that gives valuable time back to IT departments by giving more control to business users. SAS ETLQ is a data integration platform that synthesises corporate data from disparate information silos in a timely, cost-effective manner. It is the only ETL solution with integrated data cleansing routines that are both customisable and usable out of the box.