Industry: Health Insurance
Client Type: Fortune 500 Insurer
Key Technologies: IBM MQ, Confluent Kafka, SnapLogic, JDBC Connectors
Challenge
The client, a Fortune 500 health insurer, operated critical pharmacy data pipelines—One Medication List (OML) and Real-Time Pharmacy Claims (RTPC)—on an isolated Confluent Kafka cluster.
While the cluster delivered throughput and uptime, its architectural isolation created both economic and operational friction:
- Escalating Costs: Maintaining 60 non-production and 25 production licenses independently led to over $500,000 annually in licensing, cloud, and maintenance costs.
- Siloed Architecture: The Kafka cluster was detached from the enterprise’s standardized cloud ecosystem (EEH), causing redundant tooling, fragmented observability, and inconsistent governance.
- Business Risk: Both OML and RTPC pipelines handled latency-sensitive workloads tied directly to clinical decision-making and claims adjudication. Any downtime or message delivery failure risked disrupting patient medication timelines, claims accuracy, and compliance with industry regulations.
The insurer’s broader strategic goal—to participate in a modern cloud-native pharmacy benefit adjudication ecosystem alongside partners—was stalled by this legacy footprint.
Solution
The client engaged Modak to execute a high-stakes migration of OML and RTPC into the EEH-managed cloud infrastructure, ensuring continuity, compliance, and cost efficiency.
Modak implemented a phased migration framework that prioritized architectural integrity and operational continuity:
Phase 1 – OML Migration
- Refactored SnapLogic pipelines from Kafka to EEH-managed topics using JDBC connectors.
- Ensured schema parity, replicated topic hierarchies, and validated real-time ingestion under production-grade loads.
- Embedded observability pipelines to monitor throughput, consumer lag, and schema drift, operating in dual-stream mode until stability was proven.
Phase 2 – RTPC Migration
- Developed IBM MQ source and sink connectors for bi-directional flow between EEH Kafka and MQ queues.
- Used SnapLogic pipelines for transformation and enrichment, preserving ordering guarantees and SLA-driven message propagation.
- Treated connectors as operational contracts, validating delivery semantics, retry mechanisms, and latency across synchronized tests.
By treating each connector and topic as a governed contract rather than a simple integration, Modak ensured end-to-end observability, fault tolerance, and compliance alignment.
Outcome
This migration achieved more than infrastructure consolidation:
- $500,000+ Annual TCO Savings
Retired the isolated Confluent Kafka cluster, eliminating redundant licensing and infrastructure costs.
- Operational Simplification
Unified pipelines under EEH’s shared monitoring, access control, and CI/CD frameworks—reducing manual intervention and ensuring platform-wide governance.
- Regulatory Alignment & Governance
OML and RTPC pipelines now operate under centralized policy enforcement with schema registries, lineage tracking, and IAM-based access controls—ensuring parity with enterprise standards.
- Business Continuity & Patient Impact
Clinical and pharmacy teams gained real-time, governed access to medication and claims data, reducing prescription delays and enhancing care decision-making.
- Strategic Scalability
The validated migration blueprint is now being extended to additional pharmacy and healthcare use cases (e.g., HPAS), positioning the enterprise to modernize other mission-critical data domains.
Summary
By replatforming OML and RTPC pipelines into EEH, Modak helped the insurer close the chapter on an unsustainable architecture and establish a repeatable model for high-integrity workload migration. What began as a cost-driven initiative became a strategic modernization milestone—reducing overhead, unifying governance, and strengthening patient and clinician experiences at scale.
