Valence Health improves data ingestion performance and scalability

Valence Health consumes 3,000 inbound data feeds, with 45 different types of data, daily.  These include critical data such as lab test results, patient health records, prescriptions, immunisations, pharmacy benefits, claims and payments, and claims from doctors and hospitals and are used to inform decisions about improving both healthcare outcomes and reimbursement. The company’s rapid client growth and the associated increasing volumes of data were straining its existing technology infrastructure. 

“At the scale we are operating, data ingestion becomes a major concern. In the past, if we received a feed with 20 million lab records, it would take 22 hours to process that data,” said Dan Blake, Valence Health chief technology officer. “The NFS capabilities of the MapR Platform can cut that cycle time down from 22 hours to 20 minutes and it’s running on much less hardware.”

Valence Health is already experiencing many benefits from its MapR solution, including increased performance, better responsiveness to customers, and higher quality data to sustain their growth over time. “MapR gives us the resource efficiency, speed and flexibility to make a huge difference in customer satisfaction,” said Blake.  “It gives our customers much faster feedback about what’s going on with the population they are trying to manage.”

Valence Health is also now able to accommodate customer requests that were very difficult to address in the past. For example, a customer might call and say: ‘I sent you an incorrect file three months ago and I need you to take that file out.’ Their traditional database solution might take 3-4 weeks to get that data deleted.  MapR snapshots provide point-in-time recovery that enable Valence to just roll back and remove that file in minutes.

The MapR Platform also makes it much easier for Valence Health to enrich its data lake with new data sources. “It’s not just the volume of data. Our data scientists are looking at new types of data like socioeconomic and demographic information, immunisation records and mobile health device data. With our old architecture it was painful to do so,” said Blake. “By integrating these new data sources, we can build new types of analytics that help our clients succeed in areas they have not been in before.”

Valence Health believes that their new data acquisition and integration capabilities will give them a leg up over their competitors. With MapR, Valence Health has a technology platform that can scale with the business over time, and can enable them to sustain their rapid growth while improving the quality of services they offer their clients. 

“Using MapR is the most important technology architecture decision we’ve made in recent years. In the long run it, it will enhance our ability to scale as a business and to help healthcare providers drive better quality outcomes while lowering costs,” concluded Blake.

“MapR enables healthcare companies to realise new revenue opportunities, reduce costs, streamline operations and deepen customer interactions,” said Jack Norris, chief marketing officer, MapR Technologies.  “MapR is the only converged data platform that combines architectural innovations with open source Hadoop software to support business critical, production applications.”