U.S. Government Facilitates Enrollment Upon Passage of Affordable Care Act Under Tight Deadline with MarkLogic
Products:
MarkLogicChallenge
U.S. Department of Health and Human services needed to build a technology platform capable of enrolling millions of Americans in new healthcare plans made available by the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Solution
Implemented MarkLogic data platform with its flexibility to adapt to multiple data sources and took advantage of its scalability, which is essential, particularly during open enrollment when transaction numbers spike.
Result
Enabled the successful launch of the solution, Healthcare.gov, in the 18-month timeframe and the near limitless scalability supported more than 160,000 concurrent users with 99.99% availability.
Full Story
Challenge
Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) needed to design, build and implement a technology platform capable of enrolling millions of Americans in new healthcare plans made available by the act—and the project needed to be completed in an 18-month timeframe.
CMS first attempted to achieve this with a relational database, but soon ran into the limitations
of that technology, including complex structural issues, high levels of maintenance, a relatively
inflexible structure and most importantly, scalability issues that make relational database technology
unsuitable to handle large quantities of unstructured data.
CMS soon realized it needed a unified data platform that could handle complex data challenges to implement the enrollment challenges presented by the ACA.
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.
Henry Chao
Former Deputy CIO at CMS HealthCare.gov
Solution
After a comprehensive due diligence search, CMS chose the Progress® MarkLogic® data platform for its scalability and easy integration of new data sources. MarkLogic ingests data as is and adapts to modifications as new data sources are added and as policies or regulations change.
With MarkLogic, CMS did not 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 when transaction numbers spike.
Result
HealthCare.gov has been running on MarkLogic for years as the largest personal data integration project in the government’s history. Additionally, CMS was able to easily migrate the solution to the AWS cloud to support its cloud-first strategy to provide the agility and scalability to meet future needs. In fact, during the latest open enrollment period from November 2023 to January 2024, the system handled transactions for more than 21 million consumers.
Some of the benefits MarkLogic provides to CMS include:
Faster Time-to-Production and Support of Heavy Site Traffic
CMS launched HealthCare.gov within the 18-month deadline. 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 99.99% 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.