Meet Our Customer
Eliza Corporation was founded in 1998 with the mission of helping to drive the modern healthcare consumer to take action on healthcare activities. By identifying unique individual motivations and barriers to bridge the healthcare requirements, interventions are made relevant in the minds of consumers.
The Challenge
Eliza Corporation solutions engage healthcare consumers at the right time, via the right channel, and with the right message in order to capture relevant metrics and outcome of their health following treatment. When the company reached out to NorthBay Solutions, they were completing nearly one billion customer outreaches per year, using interactive voice response (IVR) technology, SMS, and email channels. They were receiving data from multiple sources including customers, claims data, pharmacy data, Electronic Medical Record (EMR/EHR) data, and enrichment data.
As a result, the company was wrestling with significant challenges related to processing and analyzing massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data, which was being stored in an Oracle Exadata database. Perhaps most concerning was that the ability to continue to meet HIPAA compliance mandates was becoming an issue due to the multiple data sources in use and corresponding and data lineage issues. Specifically, Eliza must remove/obfuscate any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and PHI (Personal Health Information) from the data very early in the workflow. Considering the volume and velocity of the data, the obfuscation task itself became a Big Data problem.
Vision
In order to continue to improve healthcare outcomes through patient interaction analytics, Eliza Corporation needed to modernize its systems to support growth, streamline data processing and analysis, enhance throughput performance, and enable valuable IT staff to spend less time on system administration and more time on strategic endeavors.
Solution
Eliza originally contacted NorthBay to seek help and guidance from an organization that had deep expertise on AWS and had familiarity and experience working with healthcare organizations.
NorthBay is Premier AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner, and an AWS Big Data Competency Partner, and through our ability to consider and discuss various best practice approaches to solve the data volume problem and meet HIPAA and other compliance mandates, we quickly earned their trust. We were selected to architect the solution, implement data storage and process infrastructure, and enable their teams to process and analyze data more quickly and efficiently.
The team at NorthBay conducted an AWS Well Architected Review to identify the shortcomings in Eliza’s current system, and then designed a Data Lake on AWS Cloud while adhering to best practices recommendations, such as:
- Decoupling Storage and Compute
- Ingesting and Storing original datasets in native or close to native format
- Allowing for both real-time and batch processing
- Designing for consumption of datasets from storage with variable compute
- Providing metadata, catalog, and data discovery for content in the data lake
- Enabling access to data through entitlements and access control.
Once the AWS Cloud was fully implemented, we:
- Began data migration from the on-premises Oracle’s Exadata database to AWS Cloud
- Implemented a data store on AWS Redshift for advanced analytics
- Augmented the data store with Hive/Presto/EMR for unstructured data analytics
- Implemented a platform on which the data science team could perform ad-hoc analysis
AWS Services
Benefits
Eliza Corporation gained the ability to consume any type of data (structured, semi structured, and unstructured) at any scale while ensuring HIPAA compliance. Additionally, NorthBay Solutions provided Eliza Corporation with a roadmap and vision for integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and positioned them to command a higher enterprise valuation when they were acquired by HMS.
