REVIEWER: Darrell DeVeaux, president and CEO of HealthDetail.

BACKGROUND: Atlanta-based HealthDetail supplies health care provider directories for Medicaid and other health insurers. Customers include Fortune 50 private-sector companies to county government agencies.

PLATFORMS: Informatica Cloud Services are multitenant SaaS-based applications; their platform is the Internet cloud.

PROBLEM SOLVED: Through our provider directory line of business, HealthDetail delivers among the most accurate and compliant directories of health care providers currently available to government health payers and insurers. The directories are comprehensive, detailed and must be kept constantly up to date. Given the amount of data coming in and its breadth of sources, we were starting to experience trouble in handling the influx of information as the business expanded. Data on upwards of 2.8 million providers resided in a highly scripted Microsoft Access database, and it was increasingly painful to move among its tables and to get the data into Salesforce CRM where it could be verified by our staff. Our recourse was to either invest in costly database expertise to handle data cleansing and processing, which is the traditional approach, or else go with a more cost-effective cloud-based solution to optimize these tasks. Based on our previous success with SaaS-based Salesforce CRM, we opted for the cloud and implemented Informatica Cloud Services.

We use these SaaS-based data integration services to automatically move provider data from MySQL databases into Salesforce CRM where staff can verify the information. Once the data has been verified and made consistent, the Informatica Cloud transfers the data back into the provider’s MySQL database. As part of the process, the Informatica Cloud also automatically cleanses the provider information. In taking this route, we have avoided having to hire expensive contract database administrators and dodged the requirement for dedicated hardware and on-premise software. Overall, Informatica Cloud Services have helped us substantially shrink our data management costs; accelerated by 64 percent of our most important business process, i.e., creating accurate directories, eliminating considerable amounts of manual work and contributing to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Functionally, we use Informatica Cloud Services to automatically load and extract health care provider data across Salesforce CRM, flat files and SQL databases; to bi-directionally integrate and synchronize provider records between Salesforce CRM and on-premise databases; and to ensure the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of the data that is the foundation of the directories’ value.

STRENGTHS: Informatica Cloud Services possess two overriding strengths: breadth of functionality, including data integration, data synchronization and data quality, and remarkable ease of use when leveraging that functionality. With very little training, we were quickly productive in leveraging the services. For example, I am not a programmer, yet I perform many tasks within the Informatica Cloud. Data on providers comes into HealthDetail in dozens of different formats, including Excel and PDFs. We get Informatica Cloud Services to automatically turn them all into a standard format and integrate them into Salesforce. And I can dictate all sorts of rules to automatically enforce data consistency.

WEAKNESSES: Now that we’re running so many tasks, I’d like to see better ways to manage similar tasks. The need for the small client secure agent installation is ideal for establishing direct connections between cloud-based and on-premise systems, but it does mean that that solution isn’t 100 percent in the cloud.

SELECTION CRITERIA: The solution had to access, integrate and ensure the trustworthiness of any data, regardless of where it resided, on-premise or in the cloud, and do so in a high performance, easy-to-use fashion.

DELIVERABLES: The product delivers clean, consistent, timely data for the rapid production of accurate and compliant health care provider directories. It also enables accurate real-time reporting for HealthDetail’s market research services line of business.

VENDOR SUPPORT: The solution required minimal training to setup and administer, and Informatica’s ongoing support has been exemplary.

DOCUMENTATION: The documentation is complete, easy to understand and provides everything necessary to run the easily product.

SOURCE: http://www.information-management.com/issues/20_4/informatica_cloud_service_product_review-10018334-1.html