Wolters Kluwer

Challenges

Wolters Kluwer provides information services, systems, and software, to professionals in the legal, tax, finance, and healthcare industries all over the world. The company's Law & Business division offers healthcare research products & software solutions that offer reference and workflow tools that help hospitals and other healthcare professionals to investigate, manage, and mitigate issues around compliance and enterprise risk. To provide its customers with accurate and timely information, Wolters Kluwer depends on the ability to easily extract meaningful data from a variety of websites specializing in healthcare regulation.

Over time, as websites grew more complex and interactive, the manual extraction methods and customer scripts that Wolters Kluwer depended on to acquire information encountered problems with accuracy and the lack of scalability. This restricted the company from providing timely information to their customers which impacted the company’s bottom line and its ability to exploit growth opportunities.

Wolters Kluwer needed an industrial strength, scalable data collection system for the web; one that offered predictability, flexibility, and would allow the company to easily transfer these processes into other regulatory industries in which the company operates. They needed Denodo Data Virtualization and its innovative ITPilot tool which automates data extraction from semi-structured documents and web sources.

Solution

After their Spanish division of Wolters Kluwer successfully implemented a Denodo solution to automate the generation of marketing databases, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business (North America) felt a similar approach would prove profitable for their healthcare solutions. By using Denodo Data Virtualization's embedded ITPilot tool, the company built automated workflows for complex data extraction processes to acquire information from hundreds of regulatory websites. Denodo’s unique ability to mimic a human navigation process allowed the company to pull data from sophisticated, dynamic websites that required operations like authentication, form filling, sorting etc.

Data extracted by Denodo is feeding into multiple healthcare solutions offered by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. One example is the MediRegs Information Security Assessment Manager (ISAM), a SaaS tool to manage information security risk assessments in hospitals. ISAM receives inputs on processes like billing, infrastructure, operating room procedures and provides a list of regulations and compliance procedures like HIPAA that the hospital must adhere to. Data Virtualization is used to bring together the necessary reference information to feed the workflow tool that allows the hospital to conduct a facility audit and perform advanced risk analysis to assess its compliance levels.

After successfully deploying Denodo in their healthcare solutions, Wolters Kluwer is running pilot projects to deploy the platform in other legal, regulatory and compliance divisions. One example involves tracking "cyber" letters sent by the FDA to websites illegally selling prescription drugs online. The Denodo Platform is used to extract the details such as year, title, URL, product description from the letters and store this data in a relational format allowing it to be queried. Denodo is also used to maintain a historical database of the letters and to perform periodic checks to download newly posted letters.

Benefits

Wolters Kluwer reaped significant benefits from using Denodo Data Virtualization to develop standardized data extraction processes that mimic human navigation but with the speed and scale of high-end technology.

• Greater Data Accuracy: Wolters Kluwer saw notable improvements in extraction accuracy when compared to the earlier manual processes and custom Perl scripts.
• Increased Scalability: As the extraction process was automated, the editorial team can now focus its efforts on data enrichment rather than on data collection activities. TBusiness expansion: Wolters Kluwer plans to expand into new industry sectors that have strong regulatory requirements, like mining, using Data Virtualization as it allows the company to minimize the upfront efforts needed to build a reference data repositoryy the same team size.
• Business Expansion: Wolters Kluwer plans to expand into new industry sectors that have strong regulatory requirements, like mining, using Data Virtualization as it allows the company to minimize the upfront efforts needed to build a reference data repository.

The Quotes

"Denodo Data Virtualization provided Wolters Kluwer with an innovative, scalable platform to allow us to automate our processes for web-based knowledge extraction; letting us better serve our customers in the healthcare industry, and showing us what could be gained by implementing Data Virtualization across our entire enterprise," Guy Hanan, Data Conversion Manager, Wolters Kluwer.

Company Profile

Wolters Kluwer is one of the leading information services company providing software and services to professionals in the legal, tax, finance, and healthcare markets in over 150 countries. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company employs over 19,000 people and operates across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Their information services support over 90% of American banks, 210,000 accounting firms, 13 million healthcare and 250,000 legal professionals.

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