Imagine it.
Create the optimal infrastructure for business intelligence—balancing performance and reliability with costs.

Done.
Premera Blue Cross has created a first-rate business intelligence (BI) solution using Intel Itanium 2 and Xeon processor-based Unisys ES7000 servers running Microsoft Windows and SQL Server 2000. Premera’s new infrastructure delivers the high performance and scalability necessary to meet the tough demands of BI activities with an economical cost model from the industry-standard Microsoft Windows environment.

How Did Unisys Do it?
Given the challenge of responding to double-digit increases in healthcare costs while delivering on commitments to members and healthcare providers, information is an absolutely vital resource to health insurers. Transactional applications, such as claims processing, can be viewed as the heartbeat of these organizations. Of equal importance is business intelligence (BI)—the eyes and ears of the organization according to Alan Smit, the forward-thinking Senior Vice President and CIO at Premera Blue Cross.

Premera Blue Cross is a non-profit, independent regional health plan providing members, employers, providers and brokers with high-quality coverage and service. Operating as Premera Blue Cross in Washington State and Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield in Alaska, the company serves approximately 1.5 million members through a large, diverse network of nearly 19,000 health care professionals and 123 hospitals.

Like most heath insurers, Premera operates on a thin margin and closely monitors costs. Since 84 percent of its expenses are related to healthcare delivery, Premera uses BI to understand where its monies are going and how to better manage them. “It doesn’t take much of an error—or much of an improvement—to have a major influence on our margin,” Smit says. “It can make the difference between a year’s operating loss and operating income.” Recognizing trends early through BI allows Premera to make important financial decisions while still providing cost-effective products to its members.

The cost of the insurer’s existing BI infrastructure was growing and finding skilled developers was difficult. Bob Crownhart, Director of Infrastructure Support, explains, “We had multiple ‘computing islands’ for BI whose cost was out of proportion with the value they delivered. We wanted to drive those costs down by standardizing on the Windows environment.” Jon Wilson, Director of Analytical and Financial Applications, adds, “Our existing infrastructure was approaching its performance limits. We also wanted a fully functional test and development environment and access to better tools and a greater variety of pre-developed applications.”

Premera selected an Intel Itanium 2 processor-based Unisys ES7000 server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) as its data warehouse platform. Two additional Intel Xeon processor-based ES7000 servers running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and SQL Server 2000 support query and reporting activities. The solution offers the BI performance Premera needs in a cost-effective Windows environment. New EMC CLARiiON CX600 disk storage and StorageTek L700 tape drives increase storage capacity and enhance business continuity.

In addition, Smit and his team saw Unisys depth of experience with large-scale Windows environments and BI as a plus. Wilson says, “Unisys helped us validate Windows and SQL for BI, develop the business case, configure the system for production, and structure our data for performance.”

The migration of Premera’s UDB and DB2 databases to SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) has gone smoothly. The insurer has 3.5TB of production data that’s growing five percent monthly. It loads a total of 200 million rows per month into its dimensional data warehouse, which currently has 600GB of permanent storage and 300GB of temporary space to support query execution. Updated both weekly and monthly, the data warehouse supports queries from 135 users—analysts, power and casual—using Cognos and IBI WebFOCUS software tools. In addition, over 250 business users access standard Web-based reports. The number of users is expected to grow by 10 percent in 2004 and 20 percent in 2005. Premera’s 20+ developers use a separate development and test environment established on one of the partitions of its ES7000 server.

Results delivered


Fast answers. Better decision-making.
“To say that Unisys ES7000 servers are vital to Premera’s business intelligence efforts would be an understatement,” says CIO Alan Smit. Premera’s powerful BI capabilities help control costs and improve the quality of care. Smit explains, “We can analyze the same data from different perspectives and work with providers to find optimal treatment approaches—and create best practices in our market.”

BI also helps Premera provide heath insurance “peace-of-mind” to its members and employer groups by reducing risk from unforeseen trends. Smit says, “Our successful transition to the Unisys ES7000 server is not only important to our ability to serve our mission to our members, it’s critical to the company’s ability to do that while staying financially strong.”

The solution also provides important technical benefits. Performance is dramatically improved—one month-end financial process runs in less than six hours on the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based ES7000 server—compared to four days in the old environment. Jon Wilson says, “We’re seeing lots of queries and several extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes run in significantly less time than required in our previous infrastructure.”

In addition, the new environment offers improved productivity for both developers and business users—from better BI tools and reductions in query and ETL times of nearly 50 percent. Premera has also gained greater access to skilled personnel resources—another benefit of the Windows environment. Furthermore, IT job satisfaction has increased from the opportunity to work with contemporary technologies instead of a COBOL-based environment.

Premera faces many challenges in the future, not the least of which are addressing the trend toward consumer-directed healthcare and defining new value-added, for-fee services. Smit says, “We’ll have to handle more and more data to get this information out to the market. We see the Unisys ES7000 as a critical component of our success.”