Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
The team set out to find a new solution. “We could have gone the SAN route, but it's expen-
sive and cumbersome,” said the software engineer. They did some searching online and came across
Hadoop, MongoDB, and Cassandra. “We analyzed them and came up with a prototype for each one.
In the end, we decided Hadoop was what we wanted.”
Initially the organization downloaded Hadoop from Apache and configured it to run on ten Dell work-
stations that were already in-house. Once the small Hadoop cluster showed its functionality and demon-
strated value, the team decided to make a commitment to the platform, but would need support to do so.
When evaluating various Hadoop distributions and management vendors, they recognized that Cloudera
was different: its Hadoop distribution—CDH—is 100% Apache open source. This allows Cloudera cus-
tomers to benefit from rapid innovations in the open-source community while also taking advantage of
enterprise-grade support and management tools offered with the Cloudera Enterprise subscription.
Use case
When deciding to deploy CDH, the team set out to identify applications that were already seeing perfor-
mance issues in production. “One of the big advantages of Hadoop has been to be able to segregate Big
Data from transactional processing data and allow smoother processing of information. Basically, it allows
us to offload a lot of stress from the database,” said the company's manager of software development.
They quickly identified two areas that were a strong fit for Hadoop:
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Archiving seven years' claims and remit data, which requires complex processing to get into a
normalized format.
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Logging terabytes of data generated from transactional systems daily and storing them in CDH for
analytical purposes.
Today the health IT organization uses Flume to move data from its source systems into the CDH
cluster on a 24/7 basis. The company loads data from CDH to an Oracle online transaction processing
(OLTP) database for billing purposes. This load runs once or twice each day via Sqoop.
Impact: helping providers collect payment faster through operational efficiencies
“If you look at the margin that the average hospital has, it's between 2% and 3%,” stated the manager
of software development. “So their cash flow is very tight. Anything you can do to reduce the time to
get paid is very valuable to a healthcare provider.”
Since deploying Cloudera Enterprise, the organization has reduced the time it takes for healthcare
providers to get paid by streamlining their transfer of messages to payers. The ability to expedite this
process is especially valuable when regulatory changes come into play, such as the recent conversion
from HIPAA 4010 to HIPAA 5010.
The company's manager of software development said,
We assist with the conversion and processing of these messages. For example, 4010 messages
came in and we'd convert them to 5010 to allow seamless processing. The providers didn't have to
upgrade any of their systems when the regulations went into effect. We gave them a bit of a buffer to
implement changes. And since we do a lot of electronic processing, we can do basic sanity checks
on the messages as they come in and let providers know what adjustments need to be made in order
to get paid faster.
