CMS Speeds Time-to-Production, Creates Seamless Online Shopping Experience, and Moves to the Cloud
Products:
MarkLogicChallenge
- Data complexity (health and financial data) and data volume (records for millions of Americans)
- Compressed timeline as set by Congress
- Multiple data sources, such as insurance companies and healthcare providers
Solution
- Data Consolidation
- Master Data Management (MDM)
- Content Management and Delivery
- Cloud Migration
Result
- High Performance & Scalability
- Security
- ACID Transactions
- High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Full Story
Challenge
Following the approval of the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) needed to design, build, and implement a technology platform capable of enrolling millions of Americans in new healthcare plans. CMS attempted to achieve this with a relational database, but the project failed, so CMS selected MarkLogic to meet its 18-month deadline.
HealthCare.gov has been running on MarkLogic for years as the largest personal data integration project in the government’s history. And, CMS was able to easily migrate the solution to the AWS cloud to support its Cloud First strategy ̶ ensuring agility and scalability to meet future needs.
Add in an ever-changing and volatile, policy-driven environment into an IT infrastructure challenge, and you know you need something powerful yet agile to meet changing requirements. With the MarkLogic database, we were able to accomplish CMS goals in just months. To date, the CMS has over 11 million subscribers.
Henry Chao
Former Deputy CIO at CMS, HealthCare.gov
Solution
MarkLogic ingests data as is and adapts to modifications as new data sources are added, and as policies or regulations change. With MarkLogic, CMS didn’t have to sacrifice any features expected from a traditional database, such as government-grade security, ACID transactions, and HA/DR. Additionally, CMS could also take advantage of a NoSQL document model that handles heterogeneous and unstructured data, and scales easily — which is essential, particularly during open enrollment.
Result
Faster Time-to-Production and Support of Heavy Site Traffic
CMS launched HealthCare.gov within 18 months. In under five months post-launch, MarkLogic supported 5,500+ transactions per second to help over eight million people sign up for health insurance.
Nearly Limitless Scalability and Record-Breaking Performance
MarkLogic has supported 160,000 concurrent users and delivered over 99.9% availability. Over 99.99% of queries have logged response times of less than 0.1 seconds, without any data loss or inconsistency.
Seamless Online Shopping Experience for HealthCare.gov
CMS can now integrate data as is, so there was no need to recode data from multiple states, government agencies, and health plan providers. This made it easy to provide competitive healthcare options to site users.
