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Centerprise Data Integrator is an excellent toolset for multiple uses in a healthcare agency
May 23, 2017

Centerprise Data Integrator is an excellent toolset for multiple uses in a healthcare agency

Andre Beaumont | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Centerprise Data Integrator

We are a large federally qualified health center that serves approximately 70,000 patients per year. Recently we began implementing a data warehouse and analytics platform, and have started a project to integrate our electronic health record system into other systems. Centerprise Data Integrator has become an essential toolkit for us in translating and moving our data. We use this as our main ETL tool to load our data warehouse from a variety of sources. We also use the product to transfer semi-structure data from Citrix SecureForms into our electronic health record system. We are able to develop tablet-based electronic forms that a patient can fill out, and then use Centerprise Data Integrator to validate the data and load it directly into the patient's chart. This saves on the overhead involved in paper processes. Since the tool is so user-friendly, we have multiple teams and users that do not have a extensive SQL or SSIS training creating high quality solutions.
  • The user friendly interface to develop integration packages means that you don't need to be highly trained in SQL code.
  • There is a huge variety of out-of-box functions, translations, and connectors. This means you can get up and running with using these different components right away.
  • Centerprise Data Integrator can mine data from unstructured and semi-structured data sources like pdf files and csv's. It means that virtually anything you have can be moved into a SQL database or fed into other systems.
  • Centerprise Support has been excellent and responsive to our needs.
  • We had some issues in getting the software running with their licensing model on our Citrix Desktop. They were very helpful in working with us on this issue.
  • With any product that creates SQL code in the background, I am skeptical of how optimized that will be for our specific environment. We have not yet had problems related to this, but customers may want to monitor closely.
  • They do not yet seem to have a large customer base and robust user community.
  • By enabling the integration between electronic forms and our electronic health record system, we've been able to reduce overhead related with printing, scanning, shredding of paper documents.
  • The low barrier of expertise needed to create data integration packages has saved significantly on labor and training in these practices.
  • The ease of use has enabled us to move data integration projects forward quickly and produce results in a short period of time. The features that allow users to preview the data allow us to be more agile with the solution and get feedback right away.
We looked at continuing to use SSIS as an alternative. Although we own SSIS as part of our SQL licensing, we found that it takes a much higher skill level to create solutions. It also does not have the ability to parse unstructured data the way that Centerprise Data Integrator can. We also looked at Datawatch Monarch as a possibility but found it over-all to be cost-prohibitive. We also looked at a cheaper alternative called SimX but did not have a strong confidence in the product as we evaluated it. We landed on Centerprise Data Integrator as it met all of our business requirements and we know we could leverage it for many uses across our enterprise.
MicroStrategy Analytics, NextGen Healthcare Practice Management, Microsoft SQL Server
Centerprise Data Integrator is well-suited for creating ETL packages to load a data warehouse. The product makes it easy to insert data in a variety of ways into a SQL table. It can create a new table-structure, append to existing tables, or reload data in any number of ways. If an organization is already highly skilled in SSIS, this may not be the product for you, but if you're just getting started in having a data warehouse as business practice, this may make the implementation faster and easier for your IT team. You may also find that its easy enough to use that you don't need extensive IT training to use it. We've also found that Data Integrator makes a useful bridge between various database applications. We can easily use it to create automated scripts that run, or to transfer data between systems. Without a team of highly trained software developers, some of these options would've been out of reach for us.

Astera Centerprise Feature Ratings

10.0
Connect to traditional data sources
10
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
Not Rated
9.0
Simple transformations
10
Complex transformations
8
7.3
Data model creation
Not Rated
Metadata management
Not Rated
Business rules and workflow
7
Collaboration
7
Testing and debugging
8
9.0
Integration with data quality tools
9
Integration with MDM tools
9

Using Centerprise Data Integrator

3 - We have three users that mainly use the product at this stage in our implementation. These users range from highly trained SQL developers and administrators, to staff that have very little coding experience. One person is from our data warehouse team and another is from our application administration side of the team. Our applications administrator uses it to integrate electronic forms in our electronic health record system.