Introduction
For more than 70 years, Kaiser Permanente has provided high-quality, affordable healthcare across the United States. Following the acquisition of Group Health in Washington, the organisation set out to modernise its Teradata data warehouse. Kaiser Permanente Washington needed a scalable, automated environment to support governance, compliance, and advanced analytics across millions of members.
“The data warehouse is delivering more analytic and reporting capabilities and supports our reporting, governance and compliance efforts.”
Rhonda Ogilvie, Enterprise Data Warehouse Director
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- Unsustainable legacy SAS process: 60,000 lines of code and one key person created risk and required heavy monthly manual effort.
- Slow, complex ETL development: Legacy ETL tooling and architecture made data integration tedious and hard to scale.
- Governance and lineage needs: Compliance, data governance, and metadata management demanded better documentation and control.
- Throughput and delivery pressure: The team struggled to keep pace with business requests and deliver new subject areas quickly.
Why WhereScape?
Kaiser Permanente Washington re-evaluated its development approach to speed delivery without compromising standards. A 1.5 day proof of concept compared WhereScape RED for Teradata, with their legacy ETL tool. WhereScape rapidly delivered a fully documented enrollment and membership subject area—with both business and technical documentation automatically generated—demonstrating clear advantages in speed, governance, and maintainability.
“The true selling point was that the documentation, both technical and business versions, for everything we had done during the POC was automatically generated. Our legacy ETL tool provided us with little to no documentation. As a result, it was often only in our developers’ heads.”
– Rhonda Ogilvie, Enterprise Data Warehouse Director
The Solution
Automated Teradata Development
WhereScape RED for Teradata was adopted as an ELT solution, automating the development of native Teradata objects and dramatically reducing hand-coding across the entire data warehouse lifecycle.
End-to-End Lifecycle in One Tool
Modeling, development, deployment, and operational management all reside in WhereScape, eliminating the need for multiple tools and simplifying the path from design to production-ready Teradata workloads.
Data Vault for Consistent Views
By combining WhereScape RED with a Data Vault modeling approach, Kaiser Permanente Washington integrated data from diverse source systems into a consistent, flexible structure that can survive source system changes.
Retiring Legacy ETL and Manual SAS
The team sidelined the legacy ETL product and replaced the manual SAS-based process, delivering a new Teradata-based solution that is fully documented, automated, and easier to maintain over time.
Results
🚀 Rapid, Documented Delivery
- Delivered a fully documented enrollment and membership subject area for the new Teradata warehouse.
- Automatically generated both technical and business documentation, including lineage and metadata.
- Now manages about 6.8 TB of data, 250 databases, and 6,500 tables in the enterprise warehouse.
🚀 Stronger Governance and Compliance
- Complete data lineage and metadata management support governance and regulatory reporting.
- A supportable, transparent infrastructure replaces siloed processes and undocumented code.
- The EDW now underpins reporting and compliance efforts across Kaiser Permanente Washington.
🚀 Expanded Analytics and User Adoption
- User community grew from 500 frequent users to more than 650 active users as new subject areas were added.
- Enhanced analytics capabilities support robust reporting and predictive insight.
- Award-winning analytics, including a Teradata Opti Award for medication adherence, showcase the platform’s impact.
🚀 High-Value Use Cases Delivered Faster
- Surgery services subject area enables analysis of procedure types, facilities, physicians, and utilisation.
- Medication adherence analytics apply complex rules to pharmacy data, identifying patients who may need outreach.
- This work has driven a 2% improvement in medication adherence, a meaningful gain in healthcare outcomes.
“We no longer do any manual processing of data – a huge win for the EDW and for the organization.”
– Rhonda Ogilvie, Enterprise Data Warehouse Director
Evolving Through Three Generations of EDW
Kaiser Permanente Washington has extensive experience with Teradata and enterprise data warehousing. The organisation moved from an early Sybase-based environment to its first Teradata warehouse, then to a second, hand-coded Teradata implementation. The third-generation warehouse, built with WhereScape automation for Teradata, represents a major leap forward in speed, maintainability, and governance.
From Legacy Bottlenecks to Agile Delivery
The previous environment relied on a manual SAS process owned by a single expert, creating operational and continuity risk. WhereScape replaced this with an automated, repeatable solution and removed a significant monthly processing burden. This freed the team to focus on incremental delivery: building quickly, releasing iteratively, and getting projects done.
Data Vault as a Strategic Architecture
Implementing Data Vault with WhereScape RED allows Kaiser Permanente Washington to manage change gracefully. When source systems change or are replaced, the underlying structures can be adjusted with minimal impact on downstream users. This gives analysts and business teams a consistent, trusted view of members, coverage, and clinical activity.
Analytics That Drive Real Outcomes
Using the automated Teradata data warehouse, Kaiser Permanente Washington has delivered use cases that improve both operations and patient care. Surgery services analytics support scheduling, staffing, and facility utilisation. Medication adherence analytics ensure more patients stay on critical therapies. These projects exemplify how a modern, automated data warehouse can directly support better healthcare.
