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Open source BI wins out against Business Objects at London Oncology Clinic
London, – August 10, 2010 – Pentaho Corporation open source Business Intelligence (BI) leader, today announced that London Oncology Clinic is using Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition for management reporting at one of Europe's top cancer treatment facilities.
The London Oncology Clinic (LOC), based in London's Harley Street, is a private practice of over 35 world-class consultants, specializing in the latest peer-reviewed treatments for cancer patients. The technologically advanced clinic operates on a totally electronic system.
LOC patients generate a lot of complex data during their treatments including diagnoses, stage of disease, demographic profiling, blood test results and chemotherapy regimens. All this information is uploaded and analyzed, resulting in a volume of data greater than most other medium-sized businesses.
Although LOC offers highly personalized care, with individual consultations and treatments plans based on cutting-edge research and evidence-based treatments, it also needs to run itself like a business. Aggregating business metrics though can be daunting, as they may be contained within complex medical data. This means straightforward analysis of LOC's financial and operational health can be more difficult, due to the extraction and data transformation processes required.
Steve Rumbles, who transitioned from his previous career in nursing, to using this expert knowledge to head up the IT function at LOC, explains, "To start with we were just looking for the basic monthly information needed to manage any modern business. Our data were well structured for operational use but not for business analysis. Prior to Pentaho, analysis was very difficult to do and extremely time-consuming, involving in-house Java programming."
Experimenting with Pentaho open source business intelligence, Rumbles quickly realized the wealth of insight it brought the organization. Using the Extract, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities of Pentaho Data Integration, Rumbles was able to glean basic information on treatment types and diagnoses, which now helps inform the Senior Management and the Board.
In the future there is a plan to pull together comprehensive patient assessment data gathered by nursing staff from LOC's MOSAIQ oncology application. The results will be used to create monthly clinical outcome reports based on the standard International Classification of Diseases (ICD), using Common Toxicity Criteria (CTC) standards for disease staging and treatment plan scoring formats.
The team's ambitions do not end here. The next phase will be to extend the use of Pentaho further and provide clinical staff on the front line with up-to-the minute reports. This will involve developing advanced user dashboards and yet more data to provide insight into the recovery prospects of patients. LOC had originally considered a Business Objects solution from SAP, but saw no benefit for its considerable future outlay.
"We entered negotiations with Business Objects, but the price-level limited our options. While fine to begin with, in the future every additional user required a large uplift. With Pentaho this is not the case. We ask our clinical staff to enter a lot of assessment data and we want them to see the results of their work. We believe our staff should benefit from BI and Pentaho will make this happen."
About The London Oncology Clinic
The clinic was started by four founding partners who have been joined by an outstanding team of consultant colleagues. Now over 35 oncologists with a wide range of specialist expertise, which means patients are sure of being seen by a leading consultant specialising in their type of cancer. For more information, visit www.londononcology.com.
About Pentaho Corporation
Pentaho Corporation is the open source business intelligence leader. Thousands of global organizations deploy Pentaho software to make faster and better business decisions that positively impact their bottom lines. Pentaho provides a comprehensive BI suite that includes capabilities for data integration/ETL, modeling, data mining, analysis, reporting and dashboards. The Pentaho BI suite supports the company’s Agile BI initiative, which enables organizations to build BI applications more quickly, respond to business changes more easily and expedite time-to-value for up to 90% less cost than traditional BI vendors. Pentaho was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Orlando, FL, USA. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com.
