Clalit Health Services Group

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"The deployment time savings and efficiency of application integration engendered by this solution have provided Clalit with much faster implementation and significantly lower costs."

— Ilan Yacoby, CTO for Clalit's IT and Computing Division

Fast Facts

Challenge
Clalit Health Services needed a solution that would enable them to avoid excessive development time and cost, and ensure fast implementation

Informatica Solution
Informatica Complex Data Exchange

Benefits

• Reduced Development Cycle
• Enhanced Complex Data Format Support
• Efficient Transformation

As one of the largest public health networks in the world, Clalit Health Services Group provides comprehensive health insurance, medical care, and services to the majority of Israel's population centers. Clalit Health Services encompasses 16 hospitals and more than 1,300 primary and specialized clinics that serve more than 3.7 million patients. It also has a countrywide network of state-of-the-art pharmacies, dental clinics, laboratories, diagnostic imaging facilities, and specialists.

A Complex Data Integration Challenge

In order to consolidate updated patient records, Clalit needed to integrate information from a large number of legacy systems and documents-encompassing more than 300 disparate and complex data formats.

Developing a single data interface for any one of Clalit's hundreds of proprietary systems would require weeks of development and hundreds of lines of code. Moreover, no satisfactory solution was available to handle the transformation of the many different document formats.

Instead of undertaking a massive development effort and creating an administration nightmare, Clalit Health Services needed a solution that would enable them to avoid excessive development time and cost, and ensure fast implementation. It was determined that the best way to ensure the business integration implementation would reach its potential was to leverage the power of XML.

Transforming the Infrastructure

Clalit Health Services implemented Microsoft BizTalk Server in conjunction with Informatica Complex Data Exchange, coupling a leading EAI platform with the leading next-generation data transformation software. This combination enabled hundreds of legacy systems using Health Level 7 (HL7) data and a variety of document formats—including Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word—to interact to display updated patient records. Complex data transformations can now be accomplished within minutes rather than weeks, and debugging is graphical and interactive.

Informatica Complex Data Exchange offered a complete data integration solution, handling the variety of files and providing the required performance. It consists of two main components:

• Informatica Complex Data Exchange Studio automates the creation of sophisticated scripts for performing data ransformations, significantly reducing time and effort in complex business integration projects.
• Informatica Complex Data Exchange Engine executes these scripts in real-time, with comprehensive and flexible event logging and reporting.

Business Benefits:

Informatica Complex Data Exchange provides:

• Reduced Development Cycle: Its patented Parsing-by-Example capabilities enabled the creation of generic transformation scripts that were easily adjusted to fit each proprietary data format. Working on the example source shortened the customization effort dramatically-in some cases from days to minutes.
• Enhanced Complex Data Format Support: By working directly on PDF and Word documents, Informatica Complex Data Exchange allowed users to automatically create and test complex transformations on thousands of documents. The result was the elimination of months of development and testing.
• Efficient Transformation: Using Informatica Complex Data Exchange's scripts, the throughput rate provided transformation of a constant flow of data of unlimited file size at a rate between 10MB to 30MB per minute.

Rapid ROI

These benefits translated into a rapid return on investment (ROI). Because Informatica Complex Data Exchange's Parsing-by-Example technology works on all files, Clalit did not have to build a special conversion tool for each format. In addition, no maintenance is required for transformations built with Complex Data Exchange. As a result, more than a year of development and code writing were eliminated.

"The deployment time savings and efficiency of application integration engendered by this solution have provided Clalit with much faster implementation and significantly lower costs," comments Ilan Yacoby, CTO for Clalit's IT and Computing Division. "Thanks to Informatica Complex Data Exchange, more than a year's work of four programmers was saved, and we are now able to rapidly incorporate new formats into our environment."

Clalit realized an immediate ROI of 140 percent and reaps the financial benefit of significantly reduced annual maintenance costs.

Bottom Line