BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

Drive Business Transformation

Kevin Janes

Technical Infrastructure Team Leader

Data Warehouse

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

JANES: BlueCross BlueShield is the largest healthcare financier in the State of Tennessee. We handle over two million lives and have paid out in excess I believe of $14 billion in claims in 2004. To have visibility across the corporation is advantageous because the speed of business is changing.

Frank Brooks

Senior Manager of Data resource

Chief Data Architect

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

BROOKS: We're expanding now continually internally and externally. We're providing a lot of information particularly much faster. That's one of the key things that we've had to do.

JANES: More people across the corporation need to know more about their business, more about "the" business. So if we can give them a view of the company across the board, across product lines in a single view or a single place, that makes their job a lot easier.

Delivering Solutions

BROOKS: When we first started our data warehouse in 1996, there was an issue with how long it took to deliver the information. So in 1999 we converted to the Essential Data Stage Tool, and that tool changed our process, our weekly load process, from being over 100 hours to being less than 24 hours.

JANES: So since 1999 we've gone from Data Stage Server, to Data Stage Enterprise Edition with the parallelized engines and technology. We have also included data profiling technologies and Profile Stage as well as data quality initiatives with Quality Stage.

So from front to back, we're exploiting the data integration tools as much as we can. We're not only doing ATL metadata management, data profiling and data quality, but we're also looking forward into 2006 and later, with text analytics and one of the newcomers in 2005, UIMA.

Achieving Results

BROOKS: Many of our customers now have direct access to data that comes from the data warehouse so that our large accounts over the Internet are able to do analytics and look at their claims experience, their cost in utilization, and do a lot of their own analysis.

And it's all because we have a data warehouse and the integration that we provided of all the operational systems to move all that data into a single format. We also have to deal with regulations.

For instance, HIPPA requires us to protect it, Protected Health Information, we, we call it PHI. We're also concerned with other regulations, for instance, Sarbanes Oxley and how we're going to comply with all the regulations within Sarbanes Oxley.

The IBM products are helping us in that in they give us a controlled environment for doing the applications so that we can ensure what we're doing in moving the data and protecting that information as it is moved from one location to another.

JANES: We're trying to support the growth and continued success of the company and the tool set is allowing us to do that. We're faster, we're more agile, we're more capable, and we're delivering much more complicated solutions to the corporation to help the company as a whole.