Novation selects Oracle Exadata Database Machine to improve performance and scale of health care supply chain analytics platform

24 Jan 2012 Redwood Shores - Novation, a health care supply contracting company for the members of VHA Inc., UHC, and Provista LLC, has selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine to support the growth of its Supply Chain Data Management platform following an extensive vendor evaluation process.

With its migration to Oracle Exadata Database Machine from a third-party database, Novation expects to:

• Dramatically increase data load throughput;
• Improve customer report times from hours to minutes with Proof of Concept tests showing up to 41x gains compared to its current system;
• Achieve storage savings with Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, which delivered 10x compression rates in tests; and,
• Reduce customer on-ramp to analytic services from an average of 20 days down to hours enabling customers to gain insight into spending habits and identify cost saving opportunities in minutes.

Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Novation acts as the supply contracting company for the more than 65,000 members and affiliates of VHA Inc., UHC and Provista to help them manage and reduce supply costs.

The health care markets served by Novation include not-for-profit acute hospitals and systems, academic medical centres, ambulatory care and physician clinics, home health and long-term care facilities.

By applying data-driven contracting decisions in daily operations, Novation can negotiate, monitor and protect pricing on members' behalf throughout all phases of a contract’s life cycle using price management strategies that focus on contract and supplier performance.

Unlike consumer markets where pricing is transparent, opaque supplier pricing in the health care industry leads to potentially wide variances in pricing for supplies, capital or IT equipment, pharmaceuticals, and more.

Over 1,000 hospitals rely on Novation's Supply Chain Data Management platform to help manage their monthly spend, analyze purchases, and gain visibility into pricing. Novation offers analytics, price benchmarking tools and more to help hospitals identify and maximize contract savings.

To address the growing volume of member hospital transaction data for analysis, Novation purchased two Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 systems in May 2011. Oracle Exadata Database Machine powers Novation’s enterprise data warehouse.

With the help of Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) and system integrator with experience in Oracle Exadata, Viscosity Technology, Novation implemented a half-rack Oracle Exadata system for production and a quarter-rack Oracle Exadata system for development and testing environments on behalf of VHA and UHC member hospitals.

By owning its own storage capability through Oracle Exadata, as opposed to renting space in the Cloud, Novation has greater control over security in a more stable environment.

"The applications developed by Novation are helping the VHA and UHC member hospitals we serve identify significant cost savings opportunities", stated Alex Latham, Vice President, E-Business & Systems Development at Novation. "The interest in our solutions has meant a greater influx of data than we've traditionally seen. Oracle Exadata Database Machine will help Novation to scale linearly as our data volumes grow without any impact to performance. We anticipate that Oracle Exadata Database Machine will help reduce member hospital data processing time from as much as 20 days to mere hours, enabling members to act on cost savings faster."