ECONOMICS

Informatica Corporation, a leading provider of data integration and business intelligence software, today announced that the Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS) has successfully implemented the Informatica data integration platform to help maximize the efficiency of blood-collection efforts, and ensure the safety and sufficiency of the Australian blood supply. By integrating data from disparate local systems across the continent, the Informatica platform provides ARCBS with a consolidated view of its operations nationwide for strategic analysis. Managing more than one million blood donations each year, ARCBS implemented its national data warehouse to conduct more strategic planning and meet the significant reporting requirements of the Australian government's new National Blood Authority. The Informatica platform began integrating data from multiple state- and territory-based applications during the first quarter of 2004. In the near future, it will be integrating data from all corners of the country to create nationwide views of supply and demand, and donor behavior. "Australia has one of the safest, most effective blood-collection services in the world. The consolidated organizational information enabled by Informatica is helping us maintain that distinction in the face of growing demand," said Magdalena Wheatland, national quality and systems manager at ARCBS. "Not only do we have better and more timely information about where blood is located, we're able to more effectively follow its movement and storage to reduce waste." Added Wheatland, "Moreover, with Informatica we've gained the ability to analyze donation trends by geography and behavior, which will help drive better staffing decisions and more effective marketing campaigns as the need for blood and blood products continues to rise." The ARCBS data warehouse project was driven by Informatica distributor, Management Information Principles Pty Ltd. (MIP). Together, Informatica and MIP provided ARCBS with highly auditable and reliable data integration and transformation processes to help ensure that legislative reporting to the National Blood Authority is 100 percent accurate. The consolidated data will also help enable comprehensive analysis of blood-testing results in order to drive decisions on new testing procedures to protect against emerging diseases. "Healthcare and other public service entities like ARCBS are under extreme pressure from all sides to optimize performance, closely manage costs and comply with mounting legislative demands," said Paul Albright, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Informatica. "These organizations are increasingly turning to Informatica data integration to help them quickly optimize the use of information resources enterprise-wide and beyond. We're pleased to be helping ARCBS unite its legacy data to fully support its charter of uniting local blood-collection groups into a national service." ARCBS is an operating division of the Australian Red Cross Society and has an annual national budget of approximately AU$237 million. Funding is derived from the National Blood Authority, as well as support from the Australian Red Cross Society.