Molina Healthcare reduces application development timelines in half and shortens environment provisioning times

Molina Healthcare (NYSE: MOH) is a Fortune 500 managed care company based in Long Beach, California. Molina’s health plans serve more than three million members, primarily through government-based programs including Medicare and Medicaid.

Challenge

As the US government was preparing to overhaul the healthcare system, Molina Healthcare had to take stock of the company’s existing infrastructure, applications, and processes, and formulate a strategy for how the Molina IT organization would prepare for changes.

The team was faced with a challenge: scaling and enhancing the agility and adaptability of the company’s IT systems while managing ongoing business demands.

• In just four years, Molina’s revenues more than tripled—from $4.2B in 2011 to $14.2B in 2015. Parallel growth in data volumes was projected to cost Molina tens of million of dollars in storage.

• Molina rapidly increased its membership as a result of several acquisitions that had expanded the company’s presence into more states. Molina’s IT team was under pressure to quickly integrate disparate, disconnected systems from these acquisitions into the company’s core operations, which was critical to meeting state and federal healthcare regulations.

• Strict privacy and data security laws and HIPAA compliance requirements put an extra strain on Molina’s IT organization.

Growing business meant increasing demand for new features and functionality. Molina’s IT team recognized that it needed to adapt its data management practices to keep up with business demands.

Solution

Within the first few months of selecting Delphix, Molina onboarded over 3,000 databases and over a petabyte of data into Delphix’s data platform. This allowed Molina’s IT organization to better support development teams by reducing the time required to set up environments from weeks to just minutes.

To satisfy data privacy and security requirements, Molina adopted data-masking practices from Delphix to secure protected health information (PHI) data in non-production environments. Together with Delphix, Molina developed a solution that automatically masks and delivers secure datasets to downstream environments for development, testing, and analytics.

Results

Delphix helps Molina accelerate application development timelines, which is essential for business growth. Projects that once took six months can now be completed in three months. In addition, while Molina’s business more than tripled and the overall employee count grew exponentially, the efficiencies provided by Delphix have made it possible to keep the costs of database administration flat.

Key results include:

• Delphix helped Molina slash the time required to provision a new environment from days to less than ten minutes on average.

• By extending self-service data management to application teams, Molina’s developers can easily branch data alongside code branches, while testers can bookmark and share data with developers to resolve issues faster.

• Delphix has enabled Molina to reduce storage requirements from 4PB to 200TB, resulting in an estimated $6-$10 million savings in storage costs over three years.

In addition to accelerating application development, Delphix is helping Molina advance its reporting and analytics practices. The IT team plans to enhance the company’s analytics capabilities by minimizing the number of steps required for data extraction, delivery, and management, using Delphix to deliver high-quality data for reporting.