Solix launches healthcare data management platform, based on Hadoop

Software systems in the medical world are pretty fragmented. Even within a single hospital facility, multiple systems may be in place. In a multi-facility network, the array of systems grows further. Getting data from all those facilities integrated for analytics is hard, which means a lot of hospital systems may simply go without when it comes to analysis of the full arc of the patient experience or the hospital's operational or financial efficiencies, not mention compliance with regulatory regimes including HIPAA, GDPR and others.

And it gets worse. The large volumes of data all these systems produce, even where integrations are able to be engineered, get expensive to store on conventional data warehouse systems. That leads to having only the most recent data stored there, further reducing analytical visibility. And even if you could solve that problem, you'd need to do it again for other healthcare constituencies, like the payers (health insurance carriers), the pharmaceutical companies and the medical equipment manufacturers.

Industry-specific solution
Solix Technologies, which is announcing its Data-driven Healthcare product tomorrow, offers a solution to these challenges. Data-driven Healthcare takes a multi-faceted approach to confronting the medical data conundrum:

• Use Hadoop and its commodity, direct-attached storage approach, to store all non-recent data economically
• Automate the movement of such data off the data warehouse, through declarative data retention and archiving polices
• Partner with Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and Amazon Web Services, to assure broad Hadoop distribution compatibility on-premises or in the cloud, across disk and blob storage
• Make all of the data searchable, through Solix's Enterprise Business Record technology
• Provide custom connectors to numerous software systems common in the healthcare industry
• Provide so-called "footprints" to cover the provider, payer, pharma and medical equipment manufacturer constituencies.

With the above strategy, and taking advantage of Hadoop's more laissez-faire outlook toward data schema and integration (when compared to data warehouse platforms), Solix has provided a way for analysts in the healthcare world to get a handle on their data, search it and analyze all of it.

Self-contained
Solix's Analyst Workbench supplies data prep and visualization along with self-service BI and analytics. Solix Common Data Platform (CDP) also serves as a rich application framework, to accommodate integration of the platform into more custom applications. Solix's App Store makes such solutions available for clinical, financial and patient-record analytics, among others.

While Solix's healthcare solution is new, the company already had solutions in market for the financial services, manufacturing and telecom industries, among others. Solix is a 15-year old company that approaches Enterprise Data Management, Information Life Cycle Management, Application Performance Management, Test Data Management and Application decommissioning. Its Common Data Platform technology is available across industries and is compatible with both MapReduce and Spark execution engines on Hadoop.

New technology; proven approach
Solix also has a suite of offerings for the major ERP (enterprise resource planning) application suites, including those from SAP, Oracle and Infor. What's interesting is that such an application-centric approach, along with industry vertical solutions, while common in the enterprise software world, has been largely missing in the Big Data world.

Solix bridges that gap, which makes Hadoop a heckuva lot more industry-ready than it has been in its typically more vanilla form. The healthcare world is, of course, in the political spotlight of late; it's also in dire need of efficiencies and data-driven management. Solix would seem to be coming to the Healthcare world's aid, not only by making Big Data analytics and search technologies available there, but by bringing rigor to it that was learned building other mission-critical solutions, in other industries. This is applied Hadoop, and that's exactly Big Data world needs to move to.