Advancing Healthcare Analytics — and Saving Lives

Drug diversion is a major threat in our healthcare system. This term refers to cases to in which prescription medicines are obtained or used illegally, or otherwise diverted from their intended use within patient care. The result of drug diversion can be deadly to individuals, and extremely costly to hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

Medacist Solutions Group, where I serve as Chief Technology Officer, is on the frontlines of this battle against drug diversion and has been since 1998. Medacist is the leading innovator in drug diversion analytics, and the only U.S. patent holder in this discipline. Our solutions apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics to our clients’ data to pinpoint unusual patterns throughout the medication use lifecycle — from procurement to storage and management in a central pharmacy, on through doctor prescription ordering, pharmacy distribution to point of care, dispensing to doctors and nurses, and ultimately administration to the patient.

By using Medacist’s RxAuditor Analytics solutions, built upon the Genesis healthcare platform, healthcare providers can identify possible abuse patterns for further investigation and action. Today, thousands of hospitals across the United States rely on our analytics suites to maintain regulatory compliance, reduce liability, and ensure patient safety.

The IT foundation

Reliable, scalable, and high-performing data storage and compute solutions are business-critical assets for Medacist. They make it possible to analyze data received from clients, deliver actionable insights, provide a platform for future innovation, while delivering the highest level of security, integrity, and accuracy.

For this cloud-enabled technology foundation, Medacist’s RxCloud – our on-premise private cloud infrastructure – leverages best-of-breed compute, storage, networking, and security solutions from Dell Technologies, including Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC PowerScale storage. These enterprise level technology components ensure that the petabytes of client data being traversed via RxAuditor Analytics delivers actionable insights while remaining available and secure.

This scalable infrastructure allows Medacist to support growing numbers of clients, streaming of multi-data source integrations while delivering enterprise level performance. As the company has grown from 600 to over 2,000 clients, we were able to minimize growth in management overhead, while delivering the scalability and performance required for our increased workloads, thanks to our Dell Technologies infrastructure.

At the same time, Medacist’s infrastructure has the reliability to meet client service standards that demand 99.99% uptime. This also helps our company control expenses. The availability of our PowerScale and PowerEdge systems minimize potential exposure by upholding contractual service-level agreement commitments made to our clients.

With an infrastructure that combines PowerEdge servers for compute horsepower and PowerScale storage for high throughput which fuel our AI & analytics innovation engine, Medacist has achieved remarkable performance improvements.  Automation and consolidated processing of client data allows our algorithms to deliver highly accurate analytics, which our clients count on.

Timely, accurate and actionable insights deliver best-in-class outcomes and unparalleled time savings to our clients. With our Genesis data platform running on Dell enterprise-level hardware, we have reduced a 24-hour lag time on data processing down to 5 minutes in some cases, compared to our earlier-generation infrastructure. One of our clients reported a time savings of 120 hours per week of manual analysis as a result of the performance and efficiency delivered through our new offering.

And this is just part of the story. We also have a Hadoop cluster running in our Dell Technologies stack to perform statistical analysis of large data volumes. Unlike the legacy technology that made data sharing difficult, PowerScale supports simultaneous access of the same data using a variety of common protocols, which allows us to share data across multiple applications efficiently, and without having to create custom message-bus systems.

Our Kubernetes environment also runs in our Dell Technologies infrastructure. We have greatly increased the agility of our business by running Apache Spark workloads in Kubernetes on PowerEdge servers, and we were able to run our machine learning workloads on GPUs within the same PowerEdge-powered platform, resulting in cost savings on both hardware and operational overhead.

Looking ahead, Medacist plans to advance its healthcare analytic innovations on our Dell Technologies partnership.  As we move forward, we know we can adopt our IT infrastructure to incorporate newer technologies and drive business growth, while benefiting from the agility to innovate our best-in-breed  suite of offerings on best-in-breed technology, Dell Technologies. 

To learn more

To learn more about Medacist and our Genesis Digital Healthcare analytics platform, visit us at Medacist.com. And for a closer look at our IT environment, see the Dell Technologies case study “Advancing healthcare analytics, saving lives” and watch the video.

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