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Medullan's April Newsletter: Featuring a sneak preview of HealthSage and Medullan's Data Management Services
04/20/2009 - Medullan is delighted to have been a sponsor of the Health 2.0 conference in Boston - April 22-23, 2009. If you are attending, we hope you will visit our booth to view samples of our latest work and take a sneak peak at HealthSage – a consumer friendly health management framework developed by Medullan. Also in this issue, we highlight Medullan’s data management services with a special look at data warehousing.
Medullan a Sponsor at Health 2.0 - April 22-23, 2009
The 2009 Health 2.0 conference will be held jointly with the Center for Information Therapy on the 22nd and 23rd of April at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. The theme this year is "The Great Debates on the Next Generation of U.S. Healthcare" and features a lineup of well versed industry leaders including Don Kemper (Healthwise), John Halamka (Beth Israel), Rob Kolodner (ONC), Paul Wallace (Kaiser Permanente) and Jamie Heywood PatientsLikeMe).
HealthSage Demonstration at Health 2.0
HealthSage is a consumer-friendly, personalized, health management platform that allows users to actively manage their own health as well as that of their families. It can leverage existing health content, programs, and decision making tools and tap into the power of online communities and social networking. As an open architecture framework, HealthSage can integrate with existing assets and best of breed technologies such as:
- Decision support tools
- Programs for wellness and disease management
- Health record systems (EMR/PHR)
- Advanced data aggregation, search, and analytics capabilities
- Social networking and online communities
HealthSage brings these functions and capabilities together in one place through an intuitive user experience so that consumers can easily adopt, understand, and apply information and programs. Consumers can view their health records, health plan, current medications, treatments, and providers. While consumers and patients are the ultimate winners from a tool such as HealthSage, health plans, providers, and employers can also realize very tangible benefits from this framework.
At the Health 2.0 conference exhibit, we will demonstrate HealthSage integrated with MedCommons. MedCommons provides on-demand, real time, cloud computing solutions for electronic health record portals and enables a unified, standards-based presentation of a person's health record that links diagnostic imaging and scanned documents. Click here to learn more about MedCommons.
Contact us to learn more about HealthSage and to schedule a demo.
Spotlight: Medullan Data Management Services
We have probably told you about the many eye-catching applications developed by Medullan. Yet we often neglect to tell you about what lies beneath the shiny hood – the nitty gritty details that ensure those pages are populated with appropriate data. In this data management series, we'd like to tell you about the critical data management functions and technologies that we have come to know all too well.
Tech insight: Data Warehousing
by Julliette Thompson, Technical Manager
Medullan’s data warehousing implementations have allowed our clients to accurately report on the state of their business yesterday, today and into the future. With this business intelligence, clients have gained the ability to anticipate and detect market shifts and to respond to these through new product offerings or marketing strategies.
Handling large data sets: By working with real-world data sets containing millions of records, we have worked through the challenges associated with defining, designing, and implementing large data warehouses. We use tools such as SQL Server Analysis Services to define dimensions and facts and to maintain our warehouses. To access the data, we have built custom reports in SQL Server Reporting Services and exposed the full dataset through a data connection to Excel.
Operational systems versus data warehouses: Database storage solutions can be broken up into two types: operational systems and data warehouses. Operational systems are tuned to make saving and updating data easy, efficient and atomic. The transactional performance is optimized because only a small amount of data is affected with each operation. Also, many operational systems excise older data to keep the dataset as compact as possible.
Optimizing for high performance: By contrast, a data warehouse is tuned for query performance. Data structures contain both current and historical data and are flattened to make it easy to return all relevant data in one request. Data can be stored multiple times - in aggregate calculations and in their original form. Most data warehouses use a dimensional approach, segmenting the data into either “facts” or “dimensions.” Facts are usually measurable quantities and dimensions are reference data that give context to the facts. Organizing the data in this manner makes it easier for business users to understand and navigate the data warehouse. This ease of use has its consequences – data must be transformed into the data warehouse format and requires an investment. Also, should the warehouse need to change due to a change in the underlying business, it is straightforward to define new facts and dimensions, but is quite difficult to update existing data objects.
Please contact us for more information on Medullan's data management services. We'd love to hear from you.