vdek introduces new Data Warehouse solution

The Verband der Ersatzkassen e. V. (Association of Association of Health Insurance). (vdek), with 650 employees nationwide, represents the interests and provides the services of all substitute health insurance associations, which together insure almost 28 million people in Germany. Representing interests means, among other things, making recommendations on pricing or negotiating nationwide contractual decisions in the healthcare sector. To do this, they need data - huge amounts of performance and statistical information that come together in a central Data Warehouse and are analyzed there. At vdek, this has recently been the data and AI platform IBM Cloud Pak for Data System.

In close coordination with IBM and TIMETOACT GROUP as technology partner, Jana Wiedenfeld and her IT team selected the successor solution and determined the project approach. "Initially, we had considered another IBM instance, an appliance based on DB2," explains the IT specialist. "However, this would have meant a complete database change, with adaptation of all interfaces and processes" – probably a resource-consuming effort lasting several months, which the vdek did not want to risk. It therefore opted for Cloud Pak for Data with PostgreSQL as the direct successor to PDA: the same database system, just the next generation. "The whole ETL processes just had to be reorganized as a result," says Jana Wiedenfeld.

After procurement and delivery by IBM, TIMETOACT installed and configured the system in mid-2020, installed the software packages, brought them up to date, and finally migrated the previous solution to IBM Cloud Pak for Data System. 

A significant improvement when working with the new appliance is its higher performance. Without any changes to data models or the structure of the database, queries run almost four times faster in the new system, and load processes almost twice as fast compared to the predecessor. It clearly pays off when performing BI analyses. With Cloud Pak for Data System, data can be prepared at high speed so that administrators can use their BI tools to draw reports from it. This makes it possible, for example, to decide more quickly how structured care programs, such as diabetes, can be further developed. Based on physician billing and data on regional changes in mortality, recommendations can be made for annual contract negotiations for physician programs. "The substitute health insurance funds also use our BI to monitor the development of their drug prescriptions and prices in comparison to the overall statutory health insurance system. Based on this, it can be decided whether tenders for discounts can be launched for certain groups of drugs," reports Jana Wiedenfeld.

The new IBM appliance is therefore an important aid for the vdek in making contractual decisions. The amount of data in the healthcare sector is also growing year by year. Channeling this data requires modern equipment – which TIMETOACT GROUP provided to the association with minimal migration effort.