Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that National Health Service (NHS) Islington has deployed Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition for data mining, reporting, and extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities. The application, implemented by Pentaho Certified Partner ThotWave Technologies, allows NHS Islington to identify high-risk patients and initiate preventative care, leading to lower hospital admissions, operating costs and healthcare spend.

NHS Islington is responsible for improving health and health services in the London Borough of Islington and is one of 150 local NHS organizations in the United Kingdom. NHS Islington has 39 general practitioner offices, 25 dental practices, 46 pharmacies and 30 optometrists.

Prior to its Pentaho BI deployment, NHS Islington and general practitioners relied on an application with limited data to identify high-risk patients and treat them with preventative interventions. The solution picked up a limited range of patients and was limited in the sources of data that it could support.

"Rising health care costs are a concern around the globe," said Jeff Wright, chief technology officer at ThotWave Technologies. "It was exciting to show how quickly we could implement a predictive model using Pentaho to highlight the patients where counseling and preventive medicine can make the biggest impact."

Since replacing the legacy system with the ETL and data mining capabilities of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, NHS Islington is now able to gather and analyze additional information from a national source of patient admissions and emergency data. The Pentaho solution extracts data from multiple national and local sources and integrates into a centralized Microsoft SQL Server database. Using a logistic regression data model, Pentaho Data Mining Enterprise Edition evaluates a wide breadth of patient attributes such as current medication and prior hospitalizations to distinguish which patients have a greater risk of hospital admission. With this information in hand, NHS nurses and general practitioners can take the appropriate preventative measures to help avoid future hospitalization, in turn lowing their healthcare costs, which average £1,500 per day in the United Kingdom.

"Choosing Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition allowed us to improve our use of diverse data sources and sophisticated analytical techniques at a much lower total cost of ownership than competitor products," said Ian Tritschler, head of provider business development at NHS Islington. "The overall solution is a huge win for both our providers and our patients, improving care while reducing costs."