H E A LT H Y C H O I C E
O R AC L E DATA WA R E H O U S E S O LU T I O N P R OV E S T H E R I G H T
E L I X I R FO R I N T E R M O U N TA I N H E A LT H C A R E
Intermountain Healthcare
is a community-owned, nonprofit healthcare organization
that serves the healthcare needs of 2.4 million Utah
and southeastern Idaho residents. Headquartered in Salt
Lake City, Utah, Intermountain currently employs more
than 25,000 people and operates 21 hospitals. In total,
Intermountain administers a network of over 150 healthcare
facilities.
In 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, Intermountain was
ranked the No. 1 healthcare system (of nearly 600 evaluated)
in the United States by Modern Healthcare magazine and the
Verispan research firm. Intermountain is the only organiza-
tion to have been ranked No. 1 in this study five times.
Besides a reputation for offering top-quality healthcare,
Intermountain is also known for its advanced information
technology infrastructure. The organization has been
named to the Hospitals & Health Networks magazine Top
100 “Most Wired” healthcare systems five times, and has
won major IT awards from publications like Computerworld
and CIO magazine.
Much of Intermountain’s strong IT reputation comes
from its pioneering work in healthcare data warehousing.
Its rapidly growing enterprise data warehouse, now at 4.5
terabytes in size, gives Intermountain’s management team a
comprehensive view of the organization’s operations.This
has allowed them to conduct research and analysis in order
to identify best clinical practices, resulting in improved
patient care and lower costs.
TOP-DOWN SUPPORT
“The value the data warehouse group delivers is very well-
recognized and supported by all the business units at
Intermountain,” says Marc Probst, Intermountain’s chief
information officer. “This support is owed solely to the
great value the business units derive from the data ware-
house, much of which is very measurable and quantifiable.
It’s clearly understood that our data warehouse has tremen-
dous clinical value that results in excellence in patient care
and client service.”
Intermountain initiated its data warehouse efforts 10 years
ago. At that time, the IT department sought out other
healthcare organizations with data warehouse experience,
but found few that had done much work in that area. As a
result, the IT group embarked on a solo, determined effort
to harness the power of information from all parts of the
organization’s business by establishing a single, consolidated
data warehouse.
“What we envisioned back then was a solution that
Intermountain Healthcare At-A-Glance
■ Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Intermountain is an
integrated healthcare delivery network.
■ Administers the Intermountain health plans and owns and
operates 21 hospitals with two more under construction.
■ The Oracle data warehouse supports more than 1,600
users across all areas of Intermountain’s operations.
■ Runs Oracle Database on an IBM p690 Linux server.
■ Deploys Oracle E-Business Suite to meet its human
resources requirements.
would decrease what we call ‘mean time to improvement,’
or MTTI, for each of our three major processes: clinical
care, our healthcare plan, and financial services,” recalls
Steven Barlow, manager of the enterprise data warehouse.
“Our clinical teams, like the one supporting our work in
diabetes, needed fast, reliable information to support optimal
treatment processes.The data warehouse turned out to be
an essential part of supporting the measurement and per-
formance of that standard care process, and it has further
grown to support
metrics as well as the
rising tide of compli-
ance in healthcare.”
The amount of data Intermountain’s data warehouse
holds, and the number of users it supports, have steadily
increased. In fact, Intermountain’s Oracle data warehouse is
growing 1 terabyte annually, an indication of its importance
and mission-critical nature.
One constant during these 10 years has been Inter-
mountain’s use of the Oracle database as the foundation of
its enterprise data warehouse. Besides its traditional strengths
of scalability, performance, high-availability, and security, a
big reason for the continued use of Oracle has been its open
nature. As Barlow says, “We have yet to find a tool that we
wanted to use that couldn’t be integrated relatively easily
into the data warehouse, and that includes just about any
business intelligence tool we have looked at.”
Besides, the Oracle data warehouse and the value it deliv-
ers have dovetailed perfectly with Intermountain’s core mis-
sion of providing peerless healthcare services. Says CIO
Probst, “The data warehouse is absolutely essential to what
we do here.” ■