Empowering Healthcare.gov’s MIDAS Data Warehouse & Reporting System
Data Innovation Catalog to Improve Data Discovery, Governance, & User Productivity
Cogent People provided data innovation services for the Multidimensional Insurance Data Analytics System (MIDAS), the central data warehouse and reporting system supporting all Healthcare.gov Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Key Objectives
As part of the Marketplace Advisor and System Integrator (MSI) contract, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) engaged Cogent People to plan systems design and development coordinate systems integration. Goals included:
- Improving data documentation and organization
- Improving how users discover, access, understand, and consume data
- Improving the data profile through data quality assessment
- Establishing data lineage and implement a formal data governance framework
- Aiding in reducing existing technical debt by allowing stakeholders to evaluate data fitness
Key Accomplishments
Cogent People aligned concurrent projects to Marketplace implementation goals and guided CMS through the system development life cycle by:
- Performing a comprehensive technical analysis of 22 commercial and open-source solutions, including Collibra, Apache Atlas, Amundsen, and Alation
- Submitting a comprehensive written report to CMS, fully explaining the tradeoffs between license cost, time to market, customization of features, and more
- Evaluating the Data Catalog in record time, demonstrating the use of repeatable processes and techniques to evaluate technology products and solutions
- Enriching more than 21,000 data objects from 920 tables using a mix of automated metadata ingestion and business owner input in less than 3 months, also record time
- Streamlining and redesigning data pipelines to minimize complexity, ensure data quality, and improve performance
Notable Outcomes
The proposed strategy was commended for its completeness and vision in meeting key targets:
- CCIO Confidence in Solution: Determined data catalog solution meets needs of Marketplace
- Data Cataloging Insights: Provided analysis and recommendations used to drive other CMS enterprise initiatives
- Analyst Productivity: Improved due to shortened data discovery process
- Business User Productivity: Improved by self-service capabilities
- Business User Collaboration: Enhanced collaboration and crowdsourcing of data knowledge and intelligence
