Pentaho Addresses Healthcare Data Challenges with HL7 Support

Hospitals Turn to Pentaho Business Analytics to Access, Standardize and Visualize Electronic Healthcare Information

November 15, 2011, — Pentaho Corporation, the business analytics company providing power for technologists and rapid insight for users, today announced native support for the Health Level Seven International (HL7) standard with Pentaho Business Analytics. The Pentaho HL7 connector enables hospitals, group practices, labs, imaging facilities, pharmacies and payers to standardize their healthcare information electronically across organizations within a healthcare system in compliance with this international health information data exchange standard.

The Pentaho HL7 capability is already being leveraged at St. Antonius Hospital in the Netherlands. The Hospital is using the HL7 capabilities to standardize data from all of the departmental systems and make the information available for analytics and visualization across multiple disciplines, such as administration, cardiology and lung research.

Healthcare information is typically housed in a variety of enterprise applications, each with its own unique data store and schema. This makes exchange and sharing of information among different departments within a healthcare organization or across different organizations very difficult. At the same time, healthcare organizations are faced with increasing regulatory compliance demands from both local and national governments. The HL7 standards were developed to provide a single set of worldwide standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services.

In the United States alone, healthcare information privacy and exchange is governed by such federal legislation as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records (EHR) incentive programs, President Obama's mandate for full digital health records by 2014, and various state legislation. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) oversees healthcare information technology. Other countries, such as Canada, France and Germany, have universal healthcare systems that are administered by their national governments. In each of these cases, HL7-based electronic healthcare information exchange, management and integration is a key component for regulatory compliance, reducing costs, improving quality of care, promoting evidence-based medicine, and improving medical record keeping and portability.

About Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company, is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho's unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Pentaho's mission is to help organizations across multiple industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and IoT, enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. Pentaho has over 15,000 product deployments and 1,500 commercial customers today including ABN-AMRO Clearing, BT, EMC, NASDAQ and Sears Holdings Corporation. For more information visit www.pentaho.com.