Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare services provider has harnessed data analytics to help customers understands trends and outcomes.

1. MZI HealthCare Uses HP Vertica to Identify Big Data
Patient Productivity Gems to Help Cut Total Healthcare
Costs
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare services provider has harnessed
data analytics to help customers understands trends and outcomes.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance
Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your
moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an
impact on people’s lives.
Once again, we’re focusing on how IT leaders are improving their business
performance for better access, use and analysis of their data and information.
This time we’re coming to you directly from the HP Vertica Big Data
Conference in Boston. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our next innovation case study highlights how a healthcare solutions provider leverages big-data
capabilities. We'll see how they've deployed the HP Vertica Analytics Platform to help their
customers better understand population healthcare trends and identify how well healthcare
processes are working.
To learn more about how high performance and cost-effective big data processing forms a
foundational element to improving overall healthcare quality and efficiency, please join me now
in welcoming our guest. We're here with Greg Gootee. He is the Product Manager at MZI
Healthcare, based in Orlando. Welcome, Greg.
Greg Gootee: Hi. Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Tell me a little bit about how important big data is turning out to be for how healthcare
is being administered. It seems like there is a lot of change going on in terms of how
compensation is going to take place, and information analysis seems perhaps important than
ever.
Gootee: Absolutely. When you talk about change, change in healthcare is really dramatic, maybe
more dramatic than any other industry has ever been. If you look at other industries where they
have actually been able to spread that change over time, in healthcare it's being rapidly
accelerated.
In the past, data had been stored in multiple systems and multiple areas on given patients. It's
been difficult for providers and organizations to make informed decisions about that patient and

2. their healthcare. So we see a lot of change in being able to bring that data together and
understand it better.
Gardner: Tell us about MZI, what you do, who your customers are, and where you're going to
be taking this big data ability in the future.
Gootee: MZI Healthcare has predominantly been working on the payer side. We have a product
that's been on the market for over 25 years helping with benefit administration
and the lines of payers and different independent physician associations (IPAs)
and third-party administrators (TPAs).
Our customers have always had a very tough time bringing in data from
different sources. A little over two years ago, MZI decided to look at how we
could leverage that data to help our customers better understand their risk and
their patients, and ultimately change the outcomes for those patients.
Predictive analysis
Gardner: I think that's how the newer regulatory environment is lining up in terms of
compensation. This is about outcomes, rather than procedures. Tell us about your requirements
for big data in order to start doing more of that predictive analysis.
Gootee: If you think about how data has been stored in the past for patients across their
continuum of care, where, as they went from facility to facility, and physician to physician, it's
really been so spread apart. It's been difficult to help understand even how the treatments are
affecting that patient.
I've talked a lot about my aunt in previous interviews. Last year, she went into a coma, not
because the doctors weren't doing the right thing, but because they were unable to understand
what the other doctors were doing.
She went to many specialists and took medication from each one of those to
help with her given problem, but what happened was there was an interaction
with medication. They didn't even know if she’d come out of the coma.
These things happen every day. Doctors make informed decisions from their
experience and the data that they have. So it's critical that they can actually see all the
information that's available to them.
When we look at healthcare and how it's changing, for example the Affordable Care Act, one of
the main focuses is obviously cost. We all know that healthcare is growing at a rate that's just
unsustainable, and while that's the main focus, it's different this time. We've done that before. In
the Clinton administration we had a kind of HMO and it really made a dramatic difference on

3. cost. It was working, but it didn't give people a choice. There was no basis on outcomes, and the
quality of care wasn't there.
This time around, that's probably the major difference. Not only are we trying to reduce cost, but
we are trying to increase the care that's given to those patients. That's really vital to making the
healthcare system a better system throughout the United States.
Gardner: Given the size of the data, the disparate nature of the data, more-and-more human data
will be brought to bear. What were your technical requirements, and what was the journey that
you took in finding the right infrastructure?
Gootee: We had a couple of requirements that were critical. When we work with small- and
medium-size organizations (SMBs), they really don't have the funds to put in a large system
themselves. So our goal was that we wanted to do something similar to what Apple has done
with the iPhone. We wanted to take multiple things, put them into one area, and reduce that price
point for our customers.
One of the critical things that we wanted to look at was overall price point. That included how
we manage those systems and, when we looked at Vertica, one of the things that we found very
appealing was that the management of that system is minimal.
High-end analytics
The other critical thing was speed, being able to deliver high-end analytics at the point of care,
instead of two or three months later, and Vertica really produced. In fact, we did a proof of
concept with them. It was almost unbelievable some of the queries that ran and the speed at
which that data came back to us.
You hear things like that and see it through the conference, no matter what volume you may
have. It's very good. Those were some of our requirements, and we were able to put that in the
cloud. We run in the Amazon cloud and we were able to deliver that content to the people that
need it at the right time at a really low price point.
Gardner: Let me understand also the requirement for concurrency. If you have this posted on
Amazon Web Services, you're then opening this up to many different organizations and many
different queriers. Is there an issue for the volume of queries happening simultaneously, or
concurrency? Has that been something you've been able to work through?
Gootee: Absolutely. That's another value add that we get. The ability to expand and scale the
Vertica system along with the scalability that we get with the Amazon Services allows us to
deliver that information. No matter what type of queries we're getting, we can expand that
automatically. We can grow that need, and it really makes a large difference in how we could be
competitive in the marketplace.

4. Gardner: I suppose another dynamic to this on the economic side is the predictability of your
cost -- x data volume, x queries. I can predict with perhaps even linear ability what my cost
would be. Is that the case with you, because I know that in the past, many organizations didn't
know what the costs were going to be until they got in, and it was too late.
Gootee: If you look at traditional ways that we've delivered software or a content before, you
always over-buy, because you don’t know what it's going to be. Then, at some point, you don't
have enough resources to deliver. Cloud services take some of that unknown away. It lets you
scale as you need it and scale back if you don't need it.
So it's the flexibility for us. We're not a large company, and what's exciting about this is that these
technologies help us do the same thing that the big guys do. It really lets our small company
compete in a larger marketplace.
Gardner: Going back to the population health equation and the types of data and information,
we heard a presentation this morning and we saw some examples of HP HAVEn, bringing
together Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security, and then creating applications on top
of that. Is this something that's of interest to you? How important is this ability to get at all the
information in all the different formats as you move forward?
Gootee: That's very critical for us. The way we interact in America and around the world has
changed a lot. The HAVEn platform provides us with some opportunities to improve on what we
have with healthcare's big security concerns, and the issue of the mobility of data. Getting it
anywhere is critical to us, as well as better understanding how that data is changing.
We've heard from a lot of companies here that really are driving that user experience. More-and-
more companies are going to be competing on how they can deliver things to a user in the way
that they like it. That's critical to us, and that platform really gives us the ability to do that.
Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning how a
healthcare solutions provider has been leveraging big-data capabilities, and we've seen how
they've deployed the HP Vertica Analytics platform to help customers better understand
population healthcare trends, and also to identify how well healthcare processes are working.
So a big thank you to our guest, Greg Gootee, the Product Manager at MZI Healthcare. Thanks,
Greg.
Gootee: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And thanks also to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover
Performance Podcast coming to you directly from the HP Vertica Big Data Conference in
Boston.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP Sponsored Discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

5. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare services provider has harnessed
data analytics to help customers understands trends and outcomes. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.
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