Improved data integration and interoperability delivering better insight

Reference: News published at techwire.net

California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) – Enterprise Services Branch (ESB) and xFusion Technologies, Inc. celebrated their successful production rollout of the Modernized Data Integration, Business Intelligence Analytics and Visualization platform and migration of eight programs on the modern platform iteratively over a period of two years.

The California Department of Health Care Services’ (DHCS) provides Californians with access to affordable, high-quality health care, including medical, dental, mental health, substance use treatment services, and long-term care. With an annual budget of $104.5 billion for the support of DHCS programs and services, DHCS Medi-Cal (Medicaid) program supports 13M+ Californians with high-quality health care.

xFusion Technologies, Inc. (www.xfusiontech.com) is a State of California Incorporation, headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California, with offshore enter in India. xFusion is an expertise-based organization that specializes in serving various Public and Private sector organizations. xFusion offers a full spectrum of IT services in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Legacy Systems Modernization, Custom Product Development, Outsourced Product Development, and Data Engineering. xFusion’s xAQUA.io provides Modern Digital Platform Capability as a Service (MDP-CaaS).

The Legacy Story

DHCS legacy business analytics platform was implemented using DB2 database and SAP Business Object (BO). With over 12 fragmented datamarts, 216GB of data, 500+ reports and thousands of ad-hoc reports serving over ten different program areas, the legacy system had various business technology challenges including data integration, data quality, performance and maintainability. The data extraction and transformation process was cumbersome, and the logic flowed through many steps such as CoSort process, JCL and CICS files and execution of data integration packages.    The biggest challenge was safeguarding the Program’s health care data and maintaining the security and the privacy of the users.

With the end-of-support for SAP Business Objects, there was an opportunity to improve the Department’s business intelligence platform, while also reducing the department’s licensing and maintenance cost by replacing the existing BO reporting platform with the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform.

The Modern Platform

xFusion Technologies, Inc. partnered with the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), Enterprise Services Branch (ESB) to iteratively modernize the legacy analytics and reporting platform over a period of two years using Microsoft Business Intelligence (MSBI) technology platform – SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS), Tabular OLAP, SharePoint, MS Office, PowerPivot, PowerView, and Gallery etc. with little or no impact to the DHCS business users. The modern platform allowed the external counties with the ability to have ad-hoc reporting capabilities while maintaining compliance to the security standards of DHCS. It also gave the external county users the ability to be self-service and have the freedom to mine and report on their data.

xFusion successfully developed the overall implementation strategy and iterative roadmap in alignment to the DHCS Enterprise Data Management Strategy, Enterprise Information Reference Architecture and Strategy and Enterprise Data warehouse, Analytics and Reporting Strategy. xFusion performed the analysis of the as-is architecture, defined to-be solution architecture, implementation strategies, data source analysis, data quality assessment; developed to-be data model for the datamarts, and data migration and extract-transfer-load (ETL) strategy; implemented ETL processes, reports and tabular online analytical processing.

Iterative Modernization

DHCS and xFusion established an iterative roadmap for the project and used Agile methodology that enabled the team to quickly deliver iterative business values to the business users and iteratively migrate the following eight programs over a period of two years allowing both the DHCS Program users and the County users to perform the following self-service analytics and reporting functions over the internet and intranet:

CMS Eligibility – Children Medical Services Eligibility

CCS Claims – California Children Services Claims

APT – Children Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP) Gateway

CHD – Children Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP) Claims

TPL – Third Party Liability

MOS – MEDS Online Statistics

TCM – Targeted Case Management

CCMS – Change Control Management System

The business continued operating, using the legacy reporting systems, during the iterative modernization. The Production rollout was planned and implemented for each program and with the stability, the plan was to retire the legacy systems for each program.

Partnership and Collaboration was the key

Partnership and collaboration between DHCS and xFusion were two of the key elements for the success of the project. The DHCS and xFusion staff formed a single Scrum team from the beginning of the project to work together and share experience and knowledge over the end to end the journey of the modernization. This also enabled the Agile Knowledge Transfer.

Project’s business-driven approach used User-Centric methodology to integrate the business users with the overall planning, requirements, design, implementation and testing phase to eliminate the gaps and risks at the early stage of the project.

Agile Knowledge Transfer (AKT)

DHCS and xFusion used Agile Knowledge Transfer approach to iteratively train the technical staff on the new technologies. The DHCS and xFusion combined Scrum team allowed the technical team to learn the new technologies while working on the project over a period of two years in addition to gaining experience on the technical challenges and the solutions. The user-centric approach enabled the business users to be trained on the news reports and analytical tools.

Outcome

The new solution and integration architecture, flexible standards-based data model, and iterative data quality management improved overall flexibility and maintainability of the solution that can respond to changes quickly and efficiently. This includes automated workflows with monitoring and notification capabilities, self-service reporting and analytics capabilities for internal Program users and County users, flexible and scalable ETL processes with better performance, improved failover and scalability, and faster retrieval of reports with the advanced analytical Tabular Solution.