10/15/2003

Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration and business intelligence software, says the Pennsylvania Department of Health has “successfully implemented the Informatica data integration platform to help public health personnel more effectively detect, track and respond to disease outbreaks.”

“Aiming to address the difficulty of containing disease outbreaks within geographical boundaries and the possibility of bioterrorism,” Informatica explains, “the Pennsylvania Department of Health has implemented a statewide electronic disease-surveillance system called PA-NEDSS. Powered by Informatica’s data integration platform, PA-NEDSS promotes the use of information-system standards to help ensure automated, integrated and interoperable surveillance systems at federal, state and local levels. More specifically, PA-NEDSS improves the timeliness and accuracy of disease reporting and expands the public healthcare infrastructure to speed response to possible bioterrorism attacks.”

“Informatica’s software is important to our efforts with PA-NEDSS to quickly provide current information via our data warehouse to decision makers in the department,” said Mary Benner, director and CIO, Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Informatica’s ease-of-use has been a key ingredient in our ability to deploy rapidly by enabling us to eliminate the writing of complex and time-consuming custom code. Informatica was installed and configured in a matter of two to three days across our development, test and production environments.”

According to Informatica, “PA-NEDSS replaces a mostly manual, paper-based legacy system, enabling the electronic submission of disease data via the Internet. The Informatica data integration platform helps the department to collect, normalize and integrate data from its operational database, as well as third-party hospital, laboratory and physician disease reports for use through the PA-NEDSS data warehouse.”

“PA-NEDSS helps ensure that rapidly changing health care priorities are addressed quickly as potential new diseases emerge,” said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Informatica. “We applaud the state of Pennsylvania for its proactive approach to today’s health care challenge. By leveraging Informatica technology to improve confidence in and access to public-health intelligence, the state is helping to ensure that its healthcare workers are armed quickly to react to new public health concerns.”