Teradata announced today that Australia’s largest health insurance provider, Medibank Private, has selected Teradata for a company-wide enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The project is part of a larger legacy replacement program being undertaken by the insurer which operates over 100 retail centers nationally.

Andrew Clark, manager of Medibank Private’s Business Intelligence Competency Centre, said the new EDW will include the Teradata MPP 5500 server providing up to five terabytes of user data. Clark said that in addition, a development and test system will use the Teradata SMP 550P server with up to one terabyte of user space.

As a completely integrated data warehouse with “optimized system performance,” he said the solution “will form part of Medibank Private’s Business Intelligence (BI) capability.” After extensive evaluation of EDW providers, Clark said this solution was selected to support its multi-faceted business through faster information delivery and reporting. He said a major factor in the selection was Teradata’s Health Care Logical Data Model (HC-LDM), which reduces the time and cost for implementing the EDW. An LDM serves as a blueprint for building an enterprise data structure that provides common business definitions for all entities, resulting in a single, integrated view across the organization. It also documents business rules at the corporate level, supports consistent reporting and analytical results, and helps eliminate data redundancy.

“The implementation is part of a larger legacy replacement program which includes replacing reporting systems based on IBM dB2 and MS SQL databases,” Clark said. “We expect a significant improvement with the implementation of the Teradata EDW. It will provide a range of regular reports in a timely fashion as well as enable staff to perform ad hoc analysis with self-service access to information.”

Noel Pettitt, vice president of Teradata Australia and New Zealand, said this project highlights a trend by Australian businesses to view the data warehouse as an essential business tool and part of their wider IT infrastructure.

The healthcare industry is experiencing broad transformation, driven by pressure to improve the economics as well as the quality of health care. This begins with more complete visibility to all relevant detailed data needed to identify opportunities to improve quality of care as well as opportunities to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. Health care organizations are striving to provide vital healthcare data to the right professional at the right moment.

Core initiatives clearly underscore the industry-wide shift from being transaction-based to consumer-centric and increasingly require collective cross-organizational intelligence. These initiatives include:

-- greater customer involvement in health care decisions

-- more accountability by health care professionals

-- the global move to electronic medical records and interoperability of health information

Teradata’s momentum continues in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries as companies centralize and integrate critical information. Teradata’s presence in healthcare and life sciences industries is global and includes such organizations as the BKK Health Association (Germany), BUPA (U.K.), and in the U.S., the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Highmark Inc., Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, WebMD, Kaiser Permanente, WellPoint and a number of pharmaceutical companies.