Implementation Highlights

• Cut client on-boarding from 30 days to 5 days
• Increased performance – 48 hr process now runs in < 3 hrs
• Reduced maintenance costs by over $90,000
• Gained greater control in-house

Benefits

Standardized Data Integration Architecture - Reduced maintenance cost by over $90,000 for contractors and hardware to maintain outdated technology.

Faster Data Processing - Processing 3 years of historical data previously took 48 hours. That has been cut down to less than 3 hours with reliable results.

Faster Client Implementations - Reduction from 30 days to onboard a client to 5 days for implementation and end-to-end testing. Instead of building something new every time, EthosPartners can reuse existing building blocks. Existing integration components can be built on, improved, and experimented with, resulting in a better solution in less time – boosting productivity.

Increased Value Delivered to Clients - Clients can change practice management systems and EthosPartners can integrate with them by simply changing connectors. Pervasive Integration Hub makes giving clients their own customized experience easy; simply add a custom step to Pervasive Integration Hub for a particular client’s job.

Expanded Market - Increased speed, scalability and value translates to the ability to sell to larger physician organizations, resulting in higher subscription fees for the company. Hodge says, “Right now, we’re focusing on larger clients. We’re able to be a little bit more flexible, and offer a little bit more customization with what our clients want to see out of their data.”

Rapidly Extendable Capabilities - Since initial implementation, EthosPartners has already added McKesson Medisoft, Practice Plus, and Practice Partners to the list of supported Process Management Systems, as well as Medical MasterMind, eClinical Works and Sage Medical Manager.

Ability to Scale Up With Client Base - Welijka says, “As we gain more clients, we’re going to add more servers, more CPUs, more hard drives, and the ability to scale Integration Hub, or Pervasive in general, to multiple servers is a big plus.”

Printable Format

Putting Chaos into Order with Reliable Integration Solutions

EthosPartners is a healthcare management consulting firm. One of their main products is VitalStats, on-demand business intelligence software that allows for physician organizations to manage their practice management data as well as being able to get insight into physician performance and other factors within the revenue cycle. EthosPartners also does practice management consulting, and outsourced billing and collections.

EthosPartners’ business model is based on deriving high value from their customers’ practice management data. This requires receiving data feeds from a wide variety of medical practice management systems, and sending data back out for downstream processing. Previously, EthosPartners handled these data feeds with obsolete custom code that frequently broke, and had very high maintenance costs. Darius Hodge, Business Unit Leader at EthosPartners Healthcare Management Group, describes the situation before Pervasive as “chaos,” and goes on to say, “the situation before we adopted Pervasive was just a lot of custom code. It was unreliable. It was unpredictable.”

Pervasive Integration Hub eliminated expensive and time-consuming ongoing maintenance and streamlined the collection and processing of multiple data feeds from diverse medical practice management systems including Ideal, Misys Vision, Misys Tiger, NextGen, IDX - Groupcast, Epic, Medinformatix/GEMMS, McKesson, Medical Mastermind, eClinical Works, Centricity and Sage Medical Manager

Manage Growing Data Volumes with a Scalable and Re-usable Integration Solution

Each EthosPartners client had different practice management software installed, and EthosPartners needed to get data from all of those different systems into its data mart in order to process that data and start providing value to clients.

Prior to Pervasive, their integration framework consisted of outdated technology, brittle custom code, and unreliable DTS packages. The system was fragile, unreliable and non-scalable. The time to onboard new clients was far too long, often a month or more.

Ben Welijka, Senior Software Engineer at EthosPartners, describes the problem they faced. “The data extracts were so varied and different per client location that it became unmanageable. Most of the techniques were undocumented. Some of them were even unsupported by the original vendors. We wanted a unified solution so that we could go to any client site, and have a common set of modules, with re-usable logic, and it would be well-documented and supported.”

EthosPartners also needed a scalable solution to support increasing volumes of data from customers, and a rapidly growing number of customers.

Choosing the Software

After assessing five different vendors, Ab Initio, Business Objects, Informatica and two open source offerings, EthosPartners found that the alternatives were too expensive, not robust enough, or had gaps in their solutions. Pervasive emerged as the winner in every evaluation criterion, including being the easiest to implement.
The criteria EthosPartners used were:

• Flexibility
• Performance and scalability
• Learning Curve
• Ease of Use

Hodge says, “When it came down to it, it was really between Informatica and Pervasive. Both of them fit our business model, but in the end, Pervasive really gave us what we needed. It was very easy to use. It had a lower learning curve, and we were really satisfied with the performance of the data processor.”

A Speedy Solution with Pervasive Integration Hub

EthosPartners needed a solution to manipulate data from the client’s side, provide it back to the customer via the internet, and feed that data into a data mart for their SaaS-based business intelligence solution, VitalStats. Their goal was rapidly deployable, fast, scalable, accurate, resilient data processing from a wide variety of client data sources – typically practice management applications.

Pervasive Professional Services Group augmented the EthosPartners team to help them get their solution set up quickly and establish integration best practices. Welijka talks about that. “Part of the experience was having Pervasive guide us and build a set of prototypes for us. And we’ve re-used those templates to continue developing.” Hodge adds, “One thing that continually impresses me is the attention to detail and professionalism that the Pervasive consultants and engineers have shown.”

Hodge describes the solution EthosPartners and the Pervasive Services Group built. “From a high level, it’s the model where we have agents at our clients’ sites. Then on our server side, we have the Pervasive Integration Hub which does all the heavy data processing. Pervasive Integration Hub feeds data into our data warehouse where downstream processes do the cube generation, analytics, and presentation via the web interface for our product, VitalStats.” Integration Agents are part of the Pervasive integration suite. They reside at the client sites and are small, easily deployable and manageable. Behind EthosPartners clients’ firewalls, Integration Agents extract data from the various medical practice management systems, convert it to standardized CSV formats, and push that data to the central site via FTP.

Integration Hub + Integration Agents = Scalable, Accurate Data

Welijka said, “On the server side, Pervasive Integration Hub was a key component because it allows us to easily process each client’s data uniquely, and also add steps to external systems outside of the Pervasive integration suite. So, we’re able to define a client, define a job, a set of tasks, and then augment that with some proprietary steps.” Hodge added, “Pervasive Integration Hub allows for automation, scheduling, monitoring, and provides various invokers for us to be able to process data accurately, with great speed, sustainability and scalability.”

No Custom Code

Pervasive gave EthosPartners the connectivity and flexibility they needed to build the foundation for their on-demand business intelligence solution, VitalStats. This foundation provided increased value to clients, driving business growth, and reduced costs. Time to onboard clients was reduced by over 80%, throughput improved by 1600%, and maintenance costs reduced by over $90,000. They can process more data for more clients at a faster rate resulting in increased throughput, productivity and profitability. EthosPartners now has the infrastructure to target much larger physician organizations, vastly expanding their available market.

Pervasive also provided EthosPartners with the reliability and peace of mind of dealing with a well-established market leader. Welijka said, “I had to support the older product that was running. And the people who had built that had left the company and there was no documentation. So, you couldn’t pick up the phone and ask someone, how do you deal with this problem? I think the biggest relief was that if you have a partner like Pervasive, you can pick up the phone. You’re not left stranded in the middle of nowhere.”

Hodge summed it up this way. “The situation before we adopted Pervasive was just a lot of custom code. It was a lot of things just kind of band-aided and put together. It was unreliable. It was unpredictable. It was pretty, um, interesting. When we bought Pervasive, it brought order to how we’re doing data integration. It brought a standard way of doing things. It brought simplicity to how we created our data mart. And it’s scalable and it’s reusable.”

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