SelectHealth Cuts Innovation Time To Minutes, Accelerates Partner Engagement, And Ensures HIPAA Compliance

SelectHealth is a not-for-profit health insurance company that serves more than 900,000 members in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Embodying their mission statement of “Helping people live the healthiest lives possible,” they are committed to supporting their members and everyone in their communities to stay healthy and realize better outcomes. SelectHeath strives to provide an industry-leading, innovative health plan that brings high-value benefits and superior service at an affordable cost. 

The company sells insurance directly from their website and through partner relationships, including the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, as a standalone or bundled offering. In order to better serve customers, SelectHealth has been investing in building enhanced, native mobile and web applications for a more seamless online insurance experience and improved customer service for members. 

Through their joint work with Intermountain Health on a new integrated health value system, SelectHealth is committed to using innovation in virtual care to provide high-quality care at less cost. They are also expanding into new geographies to help more people across the country identify diseases earlier and live longer happier lives.

Accelerate innovation to capitalize on explosive growth

SelectHealth’s IT team was struggling to move fast and keep up with competitors both big and small. It was difficult for them to expand and scale their existing services to new markets and bring quality experiences at the pace of the industry. The organization also had a lot of confidential data in their production environment, which could not be shared with application development and QA teams and partners.

The challenges were significant and grew more severe over time:

1. Limited Software Development Projects 

With data residing in different data sources, such as MS-SQL, Oracle, and SAP ASE – there was no standard or consistent way of delivering data due to data heterogeneity and sensitivity. Only a limited number of applications and portals could be developed internally since they needed to connect to the central processing system.

2. Constrained Global Partner Engagement

Quality global partner capabilities and services were not predictably deployed due to data constraints, as dictated by the requirement to secure protected health information (PHI) and other highly confidential customer information.

3. Rising Capital Spend on Infrastructure and On-Site Meetings

Teams needed to acquire infrastructure in order to provide sufficient data environments for application development and QA. Additionally, confidential data couldn’t be shared outside of the production environment, so major travel costs and loss of productivity were hitting the bottom line.

Insuring future success with DevOps

The IT team at SelectHealth pursued a platform-based approach rather than a point solution to address their challenges of accelerating application development, quickly onboarding global partners, and revamping their organizational, regulatory, and compliance policies. The Delphix Data Platform virtualized their different data sources (SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP ASE) and enabled them to provide custom data environment copies to their developers. With built-in masking as part of the Delphix Data platform, the IT team could now deliver developers and partners access to data within minutes, while upholding data privacy and security standards.

SelectHealth realized a number of benefits:

1. Accelerated Application Development

They now have the ability to create an unlimited number of custom data environments, which helps Developers, QA, and test teams expand test coverage within the same timeframes while ensuring better data quality by masking production data copies.

2. Data Availability

Data consumers, including developers, QA, and testers, have access to data in minutes instead of 4-5 days. Furthermore, refresh times to get newer masked data has been completely eliminated.

3. Accelerated Partner Engagement

SelectHealth’ IT department has significantly accelerated partner engagement by 10x (from 5% to 50%) because organizational data compliance restrictions were consistently addressed for data sharing at the production site.

Key Benefits

• 10x engagement in partner engagement on projects led to additional feature delivery at a much lower cost.

• API access to masked, secure data for developers and partners

• Data provisioning and deployment in a matter of minutes rather than days.