Medacist Modernizes Data Platform

Medacist, a drug diversion analytics firm, wanted to update its data platform and build out new software-as-a-solution (SaaS) solutions.

Healthcare providers in acute, specialty, and long-term care facilities use Medacist’s solutions, built on its Genesis healthcare data platform, to identify possible drug abuse patterns for further investigation and action.

The team knew it needed a cloud-enabled infrastructure that could support latency-sensitive analytical and AI workloads at the fastest possible speeds and with extreme reliability.  To achieve its IT goals, Medacist turned to Dell Technologies and deployed its PowerEdge servers and PowerScale storage.

Medacist said that deploying the new infrastructure and expanding its SaaS offerings were key steps in shortening data processing times and increasing the accuracy of outcomes delivered through the company’s drug diversion solutions.

The Right Partnership is Critical for Modernization

In the past, Medacist has used multiple, disparate data storage and analytical systems – meaning that data and analytics functioned in silos. As a result, Medacist’s product offering became specialized due to the lack of data interoperability across data sources. The company needed a shared data plane, to enable the ability to deliver new insights to clients.

Medacist adopted and began to operate on the Dell Technologies’ Genesis healthcare data platform. With the new platform, the company was able to “unlock the power across all its data, ultimately resulting in new insights delivered to clients.”

“Our partnership with Dell Technologies allows us to take advantage of the full breadth and depth of their compute, storage, networking and security solutions,” said David J. Brzozowski Jr., chief technology officer at Medacist.

Modernization Enables Users to Work Faster and Smarter

Healthcare providers rely on Medacist’s solutions to identify possible drug abuse patterns for further investigation and action. This identification process needs to be done rapidly and accurately to be effective for healthcare providers. And given the sensitive information used in the analytics process, security is a top concern for Medacist and its users.

Medacist now operates on a cloud-enabled technology foundation that integrates Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Isilon storage from the Dell EMC PowerScale product family.

“Together, Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers and PowerScale storage help us ensure that the data our clients review and analyze remains available and secure,” said Brzozowski. “Our clients can improve patient safety or even save lives because the Dell Technologies solutions support analytics based on massive amounts of data.”

Brzozowski also explained that the new infrastructure has saved users significant amounts of time compared to Medacist’s previous infrastructure.

“On our Genesis data platform, we have reduced a 24-hour lag time on data processing to around five minutes in some cases,” Brzozowski said. “One of our clients reported a time savings of 120 hours a week as a result of the performance and efficiency delivered through our new offering.”

Pivoting away from the client impact of the new infrastructure, Medacist said the deployment has also supported the company’s rapid growth.

“As we grew from 600 to over 2,000 clients, we were able to minimize growth in management overhead while delivering the scalability and performance our increased workloads required thanks to our Dell Technologies infrastructure,” he added.

Looking to the future, Brzozowski said the scalability of the PowerEdge and PowerScale infrastructure is critical to not only Medacist’s growth, but customer growth as well.

“We can accommodate customer and data growth all while continuing to aggregate results, derive synthetic datasets and profile data in real time – without having to rip and replace servers or storage,” he said. “We can adopt newer technologies and drive business growth on our Dell Technologies infrastructure. We benefit from the agility to innovate our suite of offerings without having to worry about the underlying hardware layer.”