Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is a regional health authority providing direct and contracted health services to over 1.2 million people across Canada via 13 facilities offering a range of services including primary care, hospital care, community-based residential and home health care, mental health and substance use services.
When VCH needed to roll out a new patient information system, one that is built around a transactional database, stakeholders within the organization knew that the legacy data warehouse would not be able to support the change. Rather than replacing it, VCH implemented the Denodo Platform as a layer above it, which seamlessly integrates the two, radically different source systems, transforming views of the transactional system so that they mimic the structure of the data warehouse, while enabling additional benefits as well.
A Modernized Data Warehouse
The new data infrastructure delivers near-real-time reporting, a dramatic improvement over the reports furnished by the previous infrastructure, which supported nightly data feeds. Alan Knox, director of technical data management, estimates that overall system output has improved by 30 to 50%.
Because the Denodo Platform provides a single layer for accessing both systems, it streamlines the implementation of security rules, defining which patient has the ability to see which data, down to the level of the individual cell.
Finally, because the Denodo Platform provided access to both the old and new systems simultaneously, it enabled VCH to test the new system incrementally during implementation, without impacting users. Combined with improvements in output, this benefit enabled VCH to engage in an agile development methodology, rapidly testing and implementing new system improvements during the modernization process.
At a glance