Developing analytics that provide meaningful business insights has been the focal point of innovation in today’s technology landscape, but developing a methodology to replicate at scale can be a challenge of its own. Benefits Science LLC, a data analytics company helping organizations make smarter healthcare decisions, leverages the latest Pentaho platform from Hitachi Vantara to scale and empower its customer base.

“We empower employers to manage their employee benefits, providing them the data analytic tools and other optimization tools. And we give them a very fine, clear picture of how these plans are performing and how they can optimize their plans,” said Geo Thomas (pictured), director of information technology at Benefits Science. 

Thomas spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus). co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida. They talked about data privacy in healthcare and how Benefits Science’s Pentaho-based DevOps infrastructure is accelerating the client onboarding process, allowing for faster growth. (* Disclosure below.)

Secure and scale

The healthcare industry presents some unique challenges in data science around privacy and security. Benefits Science takes extra caution to anonymize and mask the extracted data in a standardized way — in accordance with the latest HIPAA requirements — before performing any analytics processes.

“It gives us a very standardized methodology to process this data, so we identify the PHP data, we scramble it, and then we do the development. Once the development is done and nobody touches any of those jobs, which we created with Pentaho, we run this in a very secure environment, which puts all this transformed data into a data analytical platform,” Thomas said. 

Once the standardized methodology for handling client data had been established, the Benefits Science team looked to accelerate its client onboarding flow. In the year that Thomas has been with the company, the company has grown its customer base tenfold and shortened the customer onboarding process to two weeks, he stated. Moving forward, Thomas is looking at the latest methods to improve scalability offered in the Pentaho 8.0 release.

“One of the main things I was looking at is the scalability, that there is something called worker node that got announced in 8.0, which you can scale as a Docker and you can spin off as many Dockers as you want, and it will work by itself,” Thomas said. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PentahoWorld. Neither Hitachi Vantara, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE