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With an eye on reducing costs and improving operations, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has installed the Informatica platform, which will manage patient data and provide business intelligence to drive Dana-Farber's clinical and financial operations.

On Wednesday, Informatica announced that its platform will help clinicians integrate large volumes of patient data from inside and outside the institute and identify trends in patient care across inpatient and outpatient services. Dana-Farber will also be able to predict staffing and supply requirements and apply treatment resources to where they are most needed. Additionally, researchers will have an accurate view on balances remaining on specific grants, when to apply for new grants, or when to renew existing ones.

One the business side of the institute's operations, the software will help Dana-Farber administrators organize their daily operating expense data by integrating large volumes of information across multiple departmental systems. Informatica's software will also accelerate the preparation of funding reports around Dana-Farber's $250 million annual research grants -- reducing time required to produce these vital reports from six days to just one and a half days.

"Informatica provides Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with a powerful data integration platform that can be expanded to address our future integration challenges," Rob Sutfin, Dana-Farber's data warehouse program manager, said in a statement. "The graphical development toolset helps to streamline the development process, and we benefit from Informatica's support and experience as a professional data integration provider."

Executives at Informatica said the platform can handle multiple types of data, from virtually any type of business and clinical data source, including medical record transactions in health level 7 (HL7), relational databases, flat-file extracts, mainframe data, and XML. This will help Dana-Farber with its plans to launch a new business intelligence project in which the Informatica platform will incorporate a variety of patient data from multiple sources to enable the analysis of patient care.

"The top-of-mind concerns of today's healthcare organizations -- reducing healthcare costs, optimizing the use of resources, and improving patient outcomes -- all benefit from timely access to comprehensive, trusted data," Shekhar Iyer, Informatica's senior VP at its healthcare and public sector division, said in a statement.

"The Informatica platform is proven to help healthcare organizations address their unique data challenges, from enhancing data quality across huge and constant volumes of diverse data, to automating vital processes and ensuring compliance, to creating a single view of the patient throughout the cycle of care," Iyer said.

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