McKesson Health Solutions and IBM announced they are working together to unleash the power of business intelligence for healthcare by creating an analytics solution for public and private health plans. McKesson’s premiere clinical content and healthcare business expertise combined with IBM’s information management software and health plan data model will fundamentally change the way insurers use healthcare information. The new solution will enable health plans to facilitate smarter, faster decision-making across their businesses and externally with health services enterprises, employers and consumers.

McKesson Health Solutions and IBM announced they are working together to unleash the power of business intelligence for healthcare by creating an analytics solution for public and private health plans. McKesson’s premiere clinical content and healthcare business expertise combined with IBM’s information management software and health plan data model will fundamentally change the way insurers use healthcare information. The new solution will enable health plans to facilitate smarter, faster decision-making across their businesses and externally with health services enterprises, employers and consumers.

As health costs continue to rise and medical loss ratios become increasingly difficult to control, business intelligence is more critical than ever. Yet, in today’s environment, health plans rely heavily on partial data sets to identify opportunities to improve quality and better manage results. Without a solution to integrate the data from disparate sources, plans are unable to turn their disconnected data-streams into real business value.

Together, McKesson Health Solutions and IBM are developing a solution that will unleash the power of plan-based analytics by addressing the data, communication and ease-of-use issues inherent in today’s environment. The relationship will bring health plans a business intelligence solution that will quickly consolidate, aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources and infuse it with rich clinical content and business logic. The result will be intelligent, actionable information that drives the consistent, timely care and sound business decisions that health plans need today. In addition to IBM Cognos 8 BI business intelligence software, the solution will employ IBM’s application development expertise as well as its Health Plan Data Model, InfoSphere Information Server, InfoSphere Warehouse, Optim, and WebSphere Application Server.