High availability, scalable Health Insurance platform with Cloud DevOps
Insurance
ABOUT CASE.
Insurance delivery, from the provider to the end-user is often a very complex process, with a lot of fast-changing variables involved – changing prices, end-user profile analysis and much more. Our client, an Insurance sales major, needed a platform with a centralized view of available providers, including from Healthcare.gov and Covered California. Also, it was required to suggest marketing and sales pitches automatically based on the prospect’s profile/history, recommending the “most likely to up-sell” offerings. Integration with all major healthcare insurance partners such as BlueShield, Anthem and many more was required as well.
High availability, scalable Health Insurance platform with Cloud DevOps
Insurance
ABOUT CASE.
Insurance delivery, from the provider to the end-user is often a very complex process, with a lot of fast-changing variables involved – changing prices, end-user profile analysis and much more. Our client, an Insurance sales major, needed a platform with a centralized view of available providers, including from Healthcare.gov and Covered California. Also, it was required to suggest marketing and sales pitches automatically based on the prospect’s profile/history, recommending the “most likely to up-sell” offerings. Integration with all major healthcare insurance partners such as BlueShield, Anthem and many more was required as well.
ABOUT CASE.
Much like a CRM, this was required to be a platform where a sales agent could have every possible required up-to-date information about a prospect or existing client, at their fingertips always. Throw in some marketing automation capabilities as well! Not just that, information about the family of the prospect and their insurance needs was also to be accessed. An intelligent, data-based solution would be presented to the agent, that they can pitch to the prospect.
CHALLENGE.
Pegasus One’s expert team of DevOps consultants explored the current systems used by our client and listed the following challenges which were observed before initiating the process.
- Downtime and Cloud Environment: The platform was going to serve millions of transactions each day and needed absolute checks to ensure service disruption is contained. The dependency of other systems in the current setup required review.
- App testing: Since the application was to be launched during the open enrollment period – a short window when insurance purchases are to be made – there was not going to be a lot of time to test all the aspects of the platform in a traditional fashion. A lot of new features and functions were to be added constantly, which could potentially render the platform unusable if not tested properly. The traditional methods of manual testing processes consumed a lot of time and reduced the delivery process.
- Data security: Due to the involvement of Protected Healthcare Information (PHI), which is the personal details of patients, including the patient’s details, medical history, and other similarly sensitive information, the security of data and the platform was a big concern. Information systems that hold such information need an extra layer of security to meet the compliance standards of HIPAA and others
- Two Way Data Analysis: Platform did not have the functionality to communicate the performance of sales agents to the insurance providers, which would require integration with insurance company databases sharing and receiving data on policies sold by each agent.
- Legacy to microservices: Older infrastructure and applications are problematic when moving to modern solutions. Replacement of old monolithic apps with newer microservices architecture to ensure high scalability and availability while maintaining all previous functionality and zero downtime was a major challenge.
SOLUTION.
Pegasus One reviewed the requirements thoroughly and identified the challenges to ensure that all the requirements are met in the latest solution on the cloud.
Being a leading healthcare insurance platform in the USA, it was required to ensure that the solution developed complied with regulations to stay legal under federal law. We decided on using DevOps to ensure continuous deliverability and automated testing to meet the deadline and ensure fault tolerance with containerized app architecture. It would not only allow our teams to roll out updates intermittently without causing catastrophic failures, but it would also mean that the impact of any attack or bug would be limited and easily diagnosed after isolation.
- The entire flow of data, including during feature commits, was encryption, with automated security controls implemented to ensure data security and integrity of the solution to comply with the rules and regulations of HIPAA.
- To design, develop and deploy a faster and seamless delivery process, Scrum and Kanban agile practices were adopted.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline was implemented for code deployment so that all the developers can commit their activities without breaking the app.
- It also automated version control and database code deployment.
- Automated functional, smoke and regression testing was implemented with cloud DevOps, by integrating with the CI/CD pipeline.
- Integrated with various cloud DevOps tools and orchestration of DevOps practices
BENEFITS.
- Containerized app architecture provided scalability and fault tolerance to the platform which was essential to handle variable traffic based on time of year.
- By implementing data encrypted automated security controls the data and compliance requirements were met.
- Faster time to market with DevOps practice of CI/CD that allowed a functioning product to be ready fast, with incremental feature additions.
- Enhanced business agility by implementing automated testing environments on the cloud platform
- Automated integration and deployment reduced manual errors and the streamlined entire process of testing and deployment for faster release.
