Modernizing a data lake to improve wellness
Using Caserta’s industry expertise in enterprise data warehousing and advanced analytics, this insurance giant was able to leverage IoT technologies to promote and improve wellness.
It offers health and supplemental insurance plans to all types of individuals and values people, choice, wellbeing, and innovation guide in its business practices and culture.
CHALLENGE
As part of its transformation from just a health insurance company to a wellness services firm, they performed a trial and gave out FitBits to its employees in order to track their physical activity. Those who reached certain activity levels would get recognized and rewarded. The trial helped them visualize similar programs that it could put in place with its members, with vitality goals potentially tied to credits to their insurance premiums.
The emergence of these kinds of programs, whether related to wearable devices or other electronic medical/fitness related data, brought with it the realization that a deluge of new data was on the way. This data from IoT devices, data aggregators and real-time medical systems would be presented in high volumes and in varying formats, both structured and unstructured. They needed systems capable of ingesting and analyzing these new data streams.
SOLUTION
After assessing their data landscape, Caserta recommended a new enterprise data analytics architecture capable of ingesting and extracting insights from the wealth of new data available within Electronic Medical Records and wearable medical devices.
In addition, our design recommended a new data lake, which would accept data from a variety of both structured and unstructured data sources. The data lake architecture would provide semi-governed data to a core set of data scientists and advanced data analytics specialists while making fully-governed data available to business intelligence users.
Caserta also proposed new processes and technical innovations to enforce data governance while also ensuring that the information derived from the platform would be made available to business intelligence applications and fed into other existing decision support systems.
BUSINESS OUTCOME
This data lake has become the foundation of their entire data analytics platform. Analysts now have instant access to crucial data without the need to pre-conform to a rigid data model, enabling them to quickly measure ROI on strategic business initiatives.
In fact, the same data lake and data ingestion technology have enabled this client to experiment with new initiatives in its wellness mission. By giving smart scales to people at risk of congestive heart failure, analysts were able to track their weight and intervene with those whose weight gain increased by a certain percentage over a certain amount of time. Weight data could be fed into models that determine if fluctuations were indicative of pending episodes.