Major Projects

BC Ministry of Health’s Healthideas Data Warehouse

Since 2005, Team Meta and Resonate have led Healthideas data warehouse architecture, analysis, design, operations, transition and advanced security services work.

The Ministry of Health collects and maintains data from many sources. In the early 2000’s, program areas and staff were unable to use these data stores effectively because they were siloed on diverse platforms. As the provincial steward of the health care system, the Ministry needed to develop a foundational health information infrastructure that addressed quality, security and privacy protection, and consistent metadata capture and use.

Healthideas provides a decision support environment where operational data is transformed into anonymized business information. Available information is consistently and securely stored in an enterprise data warehouse and sophisticated cross program analysis can be done in minutes using a variety of analytical tools.

Healthideas gives Ministry staff new tools and services that better support their program goals. Now, the Ministry can use the health information it routinely collects and maintains much more effectively. By changing the way in which data is organized and accessed, fundamental changes continue to cascade through the Ministry’s decision-making processes. Data leads to information, information provides knowledge, knowledge fosters insight and insight supports informed decisions. The process is iterative, and continues today. As data becomes more organized, the resulting information, knowledge and insight is leading to better and better decisions.

The issues of the day will always need to be addressed quickly and accurately. Healthideas provides a decision support environment where answers are easy to find, grounded in context and provided with an acceptable level of confidence.

BC Ministry of Education Data Warehouse

Beginning in 2001 until 2014, when we successfully transitioned our development services to an AMS provider, Team Meta and Resonate designed, developed, implemented and enhanced the EDW. Using the Oracle toolset, we created the EDW data model from the BC Ministry’s enterprise model, integrating it with our GAME infrastructure data model, and transforming the unified logical model into a physical data design.

Today, after successfully transitioning EDW operations, our expert data warehouse team continues to provide operations and on-demand developmental support services. The EDW enables the Ministry to:

• Respond to information requests and produce reports to aid student monitoring, support system administration and governance, and provide information to the public
• Maintain a single platform that serves as a secure access point for all Ministry secondary use data
• Ensure consistent naming standards and an enterprise data model making it is easier to train new analysts
• Leverage a business metadata repository, managed by the people using the data
• Conduct consistent annual reporting and decrease use of operational data for analysis

BC Vital Statistics Agency VISTA Data Warehouse

VISTA is the vital event statistics decision support system that the Agency uses to derive medical, social and demographic information products from vital event data captured during vital events registration in BC.

Team Meta resources developed VISTA beginning in mid-2000 and deployed to production in December 2001. Our senior team conceptualized, developed and implemented this award-winning (2002 Public Sector Information Technology award winner in the category of “Innovative Team Development”) data warehouse.

More recently, Team Meta assisted with incorporating VISTA into Healthideas.

Practitioner Profiles Redevelopment

In 2014, Team Meta and Resonate were invited to submit a competing proposal for replacing the Practitioner Profiles system. This legacy system was complex, labor intensive and required significant IT support to run. It was built on aging technology including the BC Government MVS platform and an about-to-be-decommissioned Condor SAS server.

For several reasons, including platform risk, resource risk, and security considerations, this project was a high priority. We were awarded a fixed price contract to replace the system with modern technology.

Using existing requirements, documentation and code review as the basis for re-development, we discovered undocumented subtleties which needed reverse engineering. As our project team uncovered more and more system defects, we engineered sophisticated comparison solutions to work through the differences and support decision making. A novel statistical analysis approach ensured new results were consistent in aggregates, each practitioner and hundreds of different measures.

This project demonstrated our breadth of skills to deliver analytically complex solutions and a deep understanding of the Ministry’s data assets / systems. The Team Meta / Resonate team proved that we can transform a process from one reliant on select technical resources to one which can be run by business users, deliver within fixed price, manage a multi-partner resource pool and reverse engineer complex legacy products deployed in multiple systems.

The Ministry now benefits from:

• An easy to maintain application that reuses and extends Healthideas data
• A flexible rule driven system in which business users can implement many of their own changes
• A repeatable system in which business users can run scenarios and compare statistical impact
• A system which is less dependent on technical subject matter experts

ILA 

ILA - Individual Learning Accounts - is an award-winning HTML based web app for post-secondary students to submit student loan applications online via the Internet. In 2002-2003 a Team Meta design team produced an adapted generic enterprise data model to meet ILA requirements. The app was 100% generated from meta-data definitions and built on the province’s GAME infrastructure. The completed application consisted of over 100 web pages with 300+ validation rules. The Team Meta team then worked with BC Ministry of Education staff to transition application maintenance and support to Ministry employees.