Surviving the enterprise integration war: HCOs can improve efficiency and reduce operational costs by implementing an operational data store for real-time views of transaction-related data - Data Management - healthcare organizations

Health Management Technology, Feb, 2004 by Helen Gurevich

Pragmatism Prevails

In the recent IT past, the competing format demands of diverse applications associated with the challenges above would produce nothing but chaos for HCOs, their IT managers and business executives.

However, an ODS is capable of establishing peaceful coexistence among the opponents in the enterprise integration war. By providing a temporary resting place for data that is important to collect but isn't ready yet for a data warehouse update, creating a special place for data that has potential long-term significance but no home in the corporate data warehouse, and enabling the tracking of dynamic data--regardless of their format--an ODS can support critical business decisions without forcing HCOs to choose sides. Thus, the HCO can emerge a winner, even as the enterprise integration war continues.

Helen Gurevich is the director of healthcare solutions, Industry Solutions Unit, of Ascential Software Corp., Westboro, Mass.