Unisys & Medscheme
Breakthrough: The Infrastructure Process Connection for Medscheme
Imagine it.

World-class infrastructure scalability, reliability and processing power at significantly reduced costs.

Done.

Medscheme leveraged a new platform to realise major cost and performance gains, and begin its transformation towards a real-time infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Process Connection

Standardising, simplifying and consolidating its entire infrastructure helped Medscheme create processing and management efficiencies, and continue to deliver an effective service to customers.

 

Metrics

Business challenge: Standardising and streamlining a complex infrastructure

Medscheme, South Africa’s largest manager of medical health plans, serves 670,000 families and 1.8 million beneficiaries in 5 African countries. It processes 45% of all health claims in the market, including up to 2 million claims per month and 21,600 real-time claims every day. In this high-volume, high-sensitivity environment, Medscheme’s IT infrastructure must deliver the highest levels of availability, speed and reliability — 24x7x365.

 

Historically, Medscheme has maintained a mixed operating environment, including UNIX-based systems and hardware running Microsoft Windows. Multiple databases and applications further added to the complexity, all of which contributed significantly to their overheads.

 

Medscheme saw the need to establish a more adaptive and flexible infrastructure that aligned directly to business goals.

 

Specifically, Medscheme sought to streamline both hardware and software, consolidate data on a single Oracle database, and deploy a new open source operating system. The key goals of the migration were to increase system performance, expand processing capabilities to handle an increased volume of transactions, simplify IT administration and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

 

“The Oracle technology has met all of our requirements, but we wanted to move our environment onto more of an open systems standard while continuing to provide the business the best possible service, so we opted for the Linux operating system,” says Kevin Wright, chief information officer, Medscheme.

 

Further, Medscheme wanted to position itself strategically to take advantage of enabling technologies and a real-time infrastructure in the future. To enable this technology evolution, Medscheme turned to its strategic technology partner, Unisys.

 

Solution: An advanced infrastructure —  designed and deployed by a valued partner

Unisys technology experts worked closely with Medscheme’s IT team to complete a thorough assessment of its business needs and develop a blueprint of its current infrastructure. That blueprint made clear the connections between key processes, applications and infrastructure. From there, the team designed a new solution that was capable of dynamically allocating resources to provide on-demand computing power and improved business continuity for real-time operations. Further, Unisys created a comprehensive consolidation and migration plan from UNIX to the new platform and designed a storage solution, based on an enterprise storage roadmap (ESR) to improve Medscheme’s data management capabilities.

 

“The ESR helped us define our information lifecycle, right through to archiving,” says Marius Dreyer, divisional director, Group IT Infrastructure, Medscheme.

 

Medscheme’s next-generation solution is based on the Novell SuSE Linux operating system and highly scalable Unisys ES7000 servers, which are designed to work with memory-intensive applications. Prior to deployment, engineers from Unisys and Medscheme worked closely to create an exact replica of the new production environment to test the systems and simulate the migration.

 

Everything was running on the new systems without any hitches … All that users experienced was better performance.
Kevin Wright
Chief Information Officer
Medscheme

The migration was completed smoothly, with one and a half terabytes of data migrated over three days during a holiday weekend. Real-time claims were processed throughout the migration, with no disruption of business. “By the time normal work resumed, everything was running on the new systems without any hitches,” says Wright. “All that users experienced was better performance.”

 

In delivering this advanced infrastructure, Unisys incorporated its knowledge and skills around process improvement into a full range of services, including strategic consulting, solution design, testing and implementation.

 

Results: Increased performance and savings

The new infrastructure yielded immediate benefits. Following the migration, first-year cost savings are expected to be $1.5 million, with hardware maintenance costs down more than 60% annually, TCO savings are expected to reach 150% in three years compared to alternative UNIX platforms.

Unisys real-time infrastructure solutions have allowed us to adapt easily and quickly to any market changes.
Kevin Wright
Chief Information Officer
Medscheme

 

Plus, power and performance have improved dramatically, with processing times cut by more than half, including:

The new system will also improve regulatory compliance; because it offers a single, consolidated database, call center agents can easily access complete records and correspondence, and record calls.

 

“The quality of the technical staff from Unisys is absolutely fantastic,” says Dreyer. “As a result, they were able to build the infrastructure quickly and effectively and support all of our business objectives.”

 

Medscheme is now strategically positioned for long-term business growth and ongoing technology innovation, with its next-generation infrastructure and open-system architecture providing the ability to optimise resource allocation. The new infrastructure is capable of handling a 100% increase in transaction volume. And the company will be able to dynamically respond to shifts in its business needs and take advantage of powerful new enabling technologies in the future.

 

“Unisys real-time infrastructure solutions have allowed us to adapt easily and quickly to market changes, ensuring continuous optimum performance, while planning for the future and at much reduced costs,” says Wright. “We will be able to run our systems on any Intel-based hardware as we expand our operations throughout Africa.”

 

The Relationship: Confidence and trust

“The work they’ve done within the Medscheme environment has been tremendous. The quality of the technical staff from Unisys is absolutely fantastic. As a result, they were able to build the infrastructure quickly and effectively and support all of our business objectives,” says Dreyer. “The decision to continue working with Unisys as our IT partner was never in doubt. We have enjoyed its premium service and support over the years.”

 

At a Glance: Medscheme

 

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