CDW enables healthcare company in adapting to market changes

Partner overview

Arkansas BlueCross BlueShield is a prominent player in the insurance industry. Their role is crucial as they offer essential healthcare coverage and services to individuals, families, and businesses, ensuring access to medical care and financial protection for a wide range of beneficiaries.

Background

Pending legislation opened up new horizons for insurance agencies to operate across state borders, intensifying market competition. Arkansas BlueCross BlueShield recognized the need to adapt to this legislative shift. They aspired to tap into a broader market, establish partnerships with more healthcare providers, and optimize their operational efficiency. Embracing cloud technology emerged as the ideal solution, offering the trifecta of flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

Challenge

The customer identified a market change signaled by the pending legislation. Keeping their competitive advantage through the market change was their highest priority. The subset priorities of maintaining that change were to reduce operational expenses and shift to a more rapidly scalable infrastructure model. In-line with scalability the customer wanted deeper engagement in data analytics to be able to provide a higher level of service.

Plan

Clear path to cloud adoption: To ensure a seamless transition to the cloud, we meticulously crafted a well-defined path informed by industry best practices. This encompassed creating a governance model that empowered the customer to strategically select workloads and proficiently manage associated costs. By laying this solid foundation, we established a framework for effective cloud integration.

Cloud Center of Excellence and Charter: Central to our strategy was the establishment of a Cloud Center of Excellence—an entity that brought together the customer's Cloud Steering Committee. Collaborating closely with the customer's infrastructure team, we forged a Cloud Charter, which served as a guiding document for the adoption of cloud technologies. This collaborative effort ensured a unified approach and strategy for navigating the cloud landscape.

Azure Landing Zone design and build: Working hand in hand with the customer's infrastructure team, we embarked on the design and construction of their first Azure Landing Zone. This endeavor entailed creating an enterprise-scale environment that adhered meticulously to Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework. Every aspect was thoughtfully considered, from comprehensive testing to implementing robust security measures in accordance with industry best practices. This approach provided a secure and high-performance foundation for the customer's cloud journey.

Conclusion and impact

The customer gained the structure and controls to scale their Azure environment as business needs require. This enabled them to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud, such as scalability and flexibility, while ensuring that they had the necessary controls in place to manage costs and maintain security.

A critical onboarding process that previously took over 45 days, was streamlined to ensure that stakeholders could on-board quickly and easily, enabling them to support the customer's clients effectively.

Finally, we were able to help the customer create a new path to revenue using their valuable client data. By leveraging data analytics, we were able to position new lines of business to targeted clients and offer the same data analytics to their corporate customers, enabling them to derive expanded, tailored solutions to their end-users.