Highmark Moves to Teradata

About three years ago Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield (Pittsburgh) made a commitment to invest in intellectual capital from a decision-support perspective, says Darren Macioce, vice president, healthcare informatics. "We moved away from traditional reporting," and shifted to more sophisticated analysis in areas such as financial performance and clinical measures.

Since demands of the analysis were too much for the existing IBM DB2 warehouse environment, Highmark chose NCR company Teradata's (Dayton, OH) 5250 four-node solution as a repository for its membership and to support data mining and predictive modeling capabilities, in a contract finalized last month. "The benchmark results were three to seven times faster, so not only am I getting a faster and probably more scalable environment, but at a lower cost," Macioce says.

Noting that the Highmark deal now places Teradata at three of the top five "Blues," Bill Sinn, Teradata's director of insurance marketing, says, "we believe this will help us to make further progress among Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations taking an enterprise-wide approach to data warehousing and dealing with customers."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio