The Datanex Platform is a healthcare focused cloud computing platform that allows solution providers to construct rich healthcare business intelligence applications that leverage the world s fastest and most comprehensive healthcare data infrastructure. Lower Your Costs Subscribers to the Datanex Platform don t need to worry about installing, maintaining, and operating physical infrastructure. Virtualized resources can be initialized and deployed with the click of a button, as needed. Standardize Your Efforts The Datanex Platform levels the playing field across your environment, and allows you to construct applications, and queries that are system agnostic. The Datanex Platform also provides you access to a rich set of healthcare standards that allow you to transition to common codesets, formats, and other best practices. Improve Your Results The speed, flexibility, raw performance, and power of the Datanex Platform means you can improve the results of your internal technical initiatives as a hospital or health plan, and means you can focus on your applications and services if you re an Independent Software Vendor. Speed Up Your Implementations Sentry s installation process assists you every step of the way, provides consultants, code, and ETL services that are unparalleled in their attention to detail, quality, and speed. Hospitals can implement the Datanex Platform core feeds without the need to dedicate significant staff time to the process. Secure Your Data and Systems Security and privacy are built in on every level, and the Datanex Platform makes standards based security and privacy protocols a foundational component that you can leverage.
Philosophy Focus on Your Core Challenges, Not on Your Infrastructure With the Datanex Platform, you re free to focus on your true challenge delivering healthcare, quantifying and analyzing trends, and improving the bottom line. The Datanex Platform is scalable, dependable, modern, and provides a foundation that lets you focus on your true challenges. Leverage Our Security Fundamentals Security of data is of prime concern in healthcare, and the Datanex Platform incorporates multiple layers of security at each level of the platform stack. Sentry s public facing servers are PCI Certified, compliant with best practice requirements as defined by both the HIPAA Privacy and Security rules, and audited daily by external third parties and Sentry s own internal security department. The Datanex Quantum Data Construct (QDC) data storage layer incorporates security as a fundamental concern, and prevents the transfer of Protected Health Information (PHI) to non-owner entities. Support for protected aggregation operations follows a well defined aggregation policy that protects individual details, but allows for the retrieval of meaningful fully anonymous aggregates. Leverage Our Healthcare Fundamentals Healthcare applications need to recognize a wide variety of data formats in order to successfully interoperate or process data, and these formats are built-in to the Datanex Platform on all levels. This bedrock support for common formats removes a costly and time-consuming barrier to ISVs and other organizations that need to access information without years of effort and significant financial investment. Natively supported File Formats ANSI x.12 formats (850,855,856,837,835, and other X.12 formats) HL7 NCPDP UB class of formats (UB92, UB04) HCFA 1500 Natively Supported Code Sets DRG CPT ICD NDC APC In addition to these lower level concepts, the Datanex ETL process converts these baseline files into higherorder healthcare concepts such as patients, diagnoses, procedures, providers, and locations while performing data quality checks along the way. Data quality is graded based on several different factos, and quality scores can be compared against national averages and among the different entities within a health system, for example. Application developers can now focus on their applications and not worry about supporting a myriad of different formats that often substantially vary from vendor to vendor. Limitations of Federated Data Models and Relational Databases Most organizations solve these problems of growth by using a federated storage model, or a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where you split your data set into many different databases hosted in many different locations. This approach has some severe performance limits and requires most aggregation operations to happen in batch. Real-time lookups are generally out of the question. Relational databases suffer from inherent performance impediments when you approach truly significant data volumes. Most relational database clustering solutions still require performance impacting locks to be made across nodes, require expensive shared storage, and require constant optimization and maintenance.
Healthcare Infrastructure Requirements Are Unprecedented Healthcare infrastructure needs to support massive data sets, fast aggregation, real-time computation, quick transport, and secure record portability. Federated or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) models don t support aggregation across truly massive data sets, centralized models don t scale in terms of price or performance, and the challenges aren t going away. The Datanex Platform provides interoperability, aggregation, a standard application programming model, and real-time performance. Versatility Leads to Enhanced Utility Today, the Datanex platform supports all Sentry Data Systems, Inc. products and services, which range from a healthcare business intelligence application (HealthBIT) to a distributed claims processing fabric (Sentrex). These applications have wide ranging needs, but all depend on having high speed, low latency access to massive data sets from many disparate systems, and this foundation is provided by the Datanex every day. Industrial Strength Technology The Datanex Platform is built on a bedrock of proven, industrial strength technologies. Some of the open standards and technology that we employ: XQuery open, standard query language. AMQP Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, designed for low latency transaction processing. XML-RPC XML based web services protocol. SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol, XML based web services protocol.
Frequently Asked Questions How long has the Datanex Platform been around? The Datanex Platform has been supporting Sentry s products and clients since early 2006. What kind of database is QDC? Who makes it? QDC is a shared-nothing, highly available, non-relational database that s built for fault tolerance, massive aggregates, and fast throughput. QDC is built and maintained by Sentry, and is not assembled from off the shelf components. This has allowed us to focus on building a next-generation platform that provides incredible speed and impressive support for applications. Can I use other Cloud Computing providers to connect to QDC or other parts of the Datanex Platform? Not at this time. Sentry, along with all other healthcare providers, has to obey federal laws such as the HIPAA, and this means that we need to make sure that participating vendors and entities pass through our application process. Also, at this time it s easier to deploy our ETL and API components when targeting a common image. How flexible is your pricing? We re a small vendor/hospital and want the Datanex Platform, but can t afford a huge investment. Our pricing is very flexible, and is designed to fit your needs. Our goal is to reduce costs for organizations compared to normal Business Intelligence platforms. What is your tech support like? How can we get help? We provide 24x7 phone based tech support, a robust ticket system, and extensive online documentation. Will Sentry build my application for me? Yes, we have an applications division that can build applications for you. These services are provided on a first-come, firstserve basis, and there may be waiting list at any given time. Can I just use the GRID portions of the Datanex Platform? Yes. However, most healthcare entities are going to want to leverage the rest of the platform. Our pricing is designed with this in mind. I m an application or hardware vendor will Sentry work with me to make my application or hardware device Plug and Play with the Datanex Platform? In many cases, yes - particularly if you re a hardware vendor with a device that would naturally plugin to the platform. Please inquire if you d like to interface your application with the Datanex Platform. If I install the Datanex Platform, can I install Sentry s applications as well as build my own? Yes. By installing the Datanex Platform, you gain access to Sentry s applications as well as any other publicly installable applications provided by other vendors.
Datanex GRID A high security, highly scalable, on-demand virtual server infrastructure that can host client applications and interact with the other components of the Datanex platform. Secure Compliance HIPAA PCI Compliant Verified Independently Network Multiple DMZs Cisco gear Intrusion Detection Personnel All SDS personnel undergo criminal background and credit checks and are drug tested. Physical Physical security provided by Tier 4 (as defined by TIA-942) datacenters Controllable You have a complete server environment at your disposal, which includes full root and console access, in addition to remote reboot services. Reliable Your server is hosted on high performance hardware provided by IBM, and monitored by Sentry technicians and our command center. Scalable Provisioning additional resources is easy, and doesn t require physical effort on your part. Interoperability With Other Datanex Platform Services Easily and seamlessly connect your GRID instances to the other infrastructure components provided. Economical The Total Cost of Ownership of a GRID instance will be significantly less than the traditional hardware, network, and security components that would be required to duplicate the service.
Datanex QDC The Quantum Data Construct, a proprietary, ultra high performance, massively scalable distributed database with a shared-nothing architecture. Datanex QDC is built for quickly storing, retrieving, and aggregating Health Record Units (HRU) across multi-million populations of patients and providers involving petabytes of associated information. QDC Features Astonishing Performance Perform aggregate queries or real-time lookups across hundreds of millions or billions of records in seconds. Economical Most organizations cannot afford to provision a world class data store infrastructure like QDC on their own, but every organization benefits from fast information access. QDC is a cost effective solution to organizations of all size and type. Redundancy Every piece of data is stored on at least three different physical resources, and at least two different geographic areas. High Availability QDC is spread across many different physical resources, both within data centers and geographic areas. How It Works QDC is not a relational database like Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. Instead, QDC is a data store that distributes queries and receives responses back from a cluster of many different computing nodes, none of which are dependant on each other. Billions and Billions of Records Relational databases perform very well when your dataset is limited to hundreds of millions of records. Once your dataset grows to tens of billions of records, performance problems become acute, and the costs associated with maintaining and servicing this type of database grow faster than any performance gains. QDC scales to trillions of records, and nodes can be trivially added as requirements increase. Fast, Shared-Nothing, Redundant Everything QDC distributes both queries and storage across many different compute nodes. There can be as many as thousands of these nodes, and they are located in geographically separate data centers. All data received is replicated across at least three nodes, and across at least two geographically separate data centers, ensuring that a node can fail without impacting the performance of reliability of the cluster at large.
Datanex ETL An Extract, Transform and Load infrastructure and associated service provided by Sentry which focuses on quickly extracting healthcare data formats and standards, with an emphasis on grading the quality of data and alerting when certain error thresholds are breached. Painless Extraction Data extraction is often complicated and time consuming. Sentry s ETL process provides Certified Third Party Installers to assist you in the extraction process. All major Hospital Information Systems (HIS) are supported, and Sentry has a library of reusable code for each that is used to drastically reduce install time and effort. Quality Transformation Once the raw data is delivered to Sentry, it gets transformed into common formats and during this process the data is cleansed and graded. During the grading/transformation process, we check the Presence/ Timeliness of elements, the Format, the Type Validity, Link Quality, and Correctness. Presence/Timeliness Do we have the files/feeds we expect, when we expect them? This is easy enough to check, but often ignored by overworked staff or systems that can t be configured to provide notifications of failure. Format The easiest determination to make, but still critical to catch errors, and when any sort of maintenance work is performed, formats can unintentionally change, causing downstream problems that often aren t identified. Link Quality For those fields that are expected to be identifiers that link data across sources, are we getting the hit rates that we expect when matching identifiers from source A against identifiers from source B? Correctness Is what we re seeing in this field consistent with what we ve seen before? Anomalies can occur at this layer that can seriously impact performance of downstream applications. Type Validity Are we getting the correct type of information? For example, do we get a number in an age field, or garbage text? For predefined fields like sex or diagnosis codes, are we getting valid values? High Performance Loading Once the cleansed, transformed data is ready, we compress it and load it at extremely high speeds, often splitting the data up into parallel chunks to import even faster. This allows us to conform to real-time demands for data processing and transport, while still providing all of the advantages of the Datanex Platform.
Datanex API The Application Programming Interface that provides for communication between Datanex QDC, the Datanex GRID, and customer applications. The Datanex API provides a rich toolkit to developers who need to access and utilize healthcare data, while not worrying about the underlying details. Standard Tools Provided The Datanex API provides several key features that allow you to focus on building world class applications. Authentication and User Management Authentication services are provided for you and your applications, along with powerful user management functions that allow you to create, update, delete, and audit users. Application Registration and Delivery Register your applications with the Datanex Platform, and have your application appear within the Datanex web application portal. Intra-Application Messaging Layer Use our redundant, standards based, high performance message broker system to transfer messages between applications. GRID Health and Application Health Monitoring Create and receive notifications and alerts about your GRID instances and Applications. Query Support Prite queries for Datanex QDC using our powerful query API. Queries can also be constructed using the XQuery language. A Variety of Modern Languages Supported Bindings are provided for a variety of modern languages, including C, C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Build your application using any of the languages above, and hook them into the Datanex Platform with ease.
Datanex NET The secure Network Transport and Interoperability layer that brokers healthcare transactions between Datanex Platform instances and serves as a digital highway for platform subscribers. Interoperability Redefined The Datanex Platform Network component redefines what s possible when it comes to interoperability. Format Agnostic Transport Don t worry about the underlying file formats required by different applications. Your data gets transported, then transformed to the correct format upon arrival. Modern, Standards Based Protocols We ve leveraged some of the fastest, most fault tolerant, modern protocols available bred from sectors such as the financial transaction industry. Queuing Support is Standard Define message queues, delivery parameters, and know that your messages will arrive. Report on Your Transport Anything that s transported via the Datanex Platform is automatically captured and logged within QDC for fast reporting, auditing, and aggregation.