BearingPoint - National Institutes of Health Case Study

Data Warehouse Management, System Design and Development

The Client

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of eight agencies of the Public Health Service and part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH comprises 26 separate institutes, centers, and divisions housed in 75 buildings on more than 300 acres.

“People are saving time and they’re very happy about that,” says Information Systems Branch Chief John Price. “Instead of going through a lot of paper, they get quick answers online.”

“By providing as many predefined queries as possible, we’ve made it so users don’t need to know the data—they just need to know which question to ask and which button is related to it. This simplicity has made the data warehouse very successful.”

The Challenge

NIH has a very specific goal: to acquire new knowledge to help prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability. Acquiring that knowledge requires quick and easy access to information from a variety of sources. To provide that access, NIH began compiling a data repository in the early 1990s and proceeded to build a data warehouse and decision support system. When NIH evaluated its efforts, it concluded that the data warehouse system was producing minimal results and inconsistent responses. NIH decided that, to meet its users’ need for easy access to integrated business information, it needed outside help to bring a data warehouse decision support application to user desktops.

The Solution

BearingPoint collaborated with NIH’s internal technology groups to design and build a decision support system. Our consulting team began by meeting with the various business units at NIH to determine their user requirements and to decide which subject areas were to be brought into the warehouse. Our team also developed predefined data warehouse queries and reports. As the project advanced, BearingPoint’s role expanded, providing data warehousing technicians to perform data extraction and transformation and evaluating various technology products on behalf of NIH.

The Benefits

The NIH data warehouse furnishes users with information that helps them understand how their business is performing and enhances their decision-making process. It provides a picture of the agency’s business performance across all administrative business areas—a capability that was not available before the data warehouse was implemented.
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