Alation Expert Spotlight: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

In this new blog series, we share interviews with Alation experts first posted in the Alation Customer Community. This interview was originally recorded in June, 2024, and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mike Repcik is the Application Manager at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), where he manages the Alation deployment and the enterprise master patient index application for the organization.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Mike Repcik, and I’m the Application Manager at UPMC. I currently manage two applications: our Alation deployment and our EMPI (enterprise master patient index) application. I’ve been at UPMC for 21 years, and I’ve been in my current department for 17 years.

For almost two and a half years, I’ve been managing an application support team for our Alation deployment, which was initially set up by our data architects in 2021. At the time, they found that Alation was a really nice tool to tie into the data management needs for our Snowflake data source. I primarily oversee the maintenance of the application, so I’m not quite “in the weeds” with the data, but we have teams that are building out reports using Alation Analytics and taking advantage of the other features. 

My team and I work with other internal teams, like data governance, security, data architects, etc., to tie the practical solutions within Alation to their business objectives. We define the processes and operationalize the use of the tool for each team. It’s been an exciting opportunity for me because I’ve been very involved in the operationalization and adoption of the Alation application at UPMC.

I’ve lived in the Pittsburgh area for most of my life and love it here.

What was your first experience working with data?

When I started at UPMC, I had a lot of hands-on experience supporting data quality on our EMPI platform, assessing situations like, “Why aren’t these merges acting in a certain way?” or “Why didn’t this message process in the way that it should have?”

Since becoming the Application Manager, I’ve had more of an opportunity in my role to see the bigger data usage picture at UPMC. It’s interesting because we don’t have a CDO here at UPMC, so we’re helping to establish the data management processes and strategy. It takes a lot of different players, and everyone has different motivations and goals. We have a big hospital initiative to make Epic the main EHR (electronic health record) system, and there are various challenges associated with that, but it’s interesting.

What is your favorite Alation product feature and why?

Part of me wants to say Alation Analytics because we use that feature quite a bit, but what excites me the most is creating efficiencies. What can we make easier? So I’m really excited for the new user experience, as well as what Alation is doing with AI.

We’ve also started to do some manual lineage, and I’m intrigued about where it’s going to go and how we can do it at a larger scale. I think it would be one of the biggest benefits for us to get a nice lineage program in place here at UPMC, so I see lineage as a potential big favorite in the future.

What is one specific improvement you’ve seen from using Alation within your organization?

We’ve been seeing people that want to store information in regards to a product or application, and they’re turning to Alation to meet this need. They're understanding the true benefit of having the data and metadata in one place. Alation is a great tool, and some people are starting to come to that realization.

What’s one fun fact about yourself that others may not know about you?

I play a lot of chess! I’ve played in a couple of in-person tournaments. If anyone would like to play some rounds of chess online, I’m game—just let me know!

I also coach for my son’s soccer team in my free time.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

The Alation Community is great, and I’m also part of the Healthcare user group community with several other Alation Healthcare customers. The Healthcare community initially started as a joint team effort with our program owner at UPMC, and another data lead, also using Alation, at a Pennsylvania hospital. 

About a year and a half ago, we came together with a few fellow Alation customers in the healthcare provider space, and now it’s grown to about seven or eight different organizations that are meeting regularly.

We hold monthly meetings to collaborate, brainstorm ideas, discuss common challenges, and share successes. We also have a private space within the Alation Community to put documentation, meeting agendas, and meeting minutes, as well as for offline discussions. We’ve found a lot of benefits from meeting with people who are in the same shoes, and encountering similar challenges because we’re all Alation users in the healthcare provider industry.

We have a great admin team, and we rotate meeting hosts each month. We’ve carved out a great space, and we’re always looking for new folks to join us. So if you’re working for a healthcare provider and are interested, please reach out!