SelectHealth is a not-for-profit healthcare provider serving more than 850,000 members in Utah and Idaho. Embodying its mission statement of “helping people live the healthiest lives possible,” SelectHealth is committed to promoting and maintaining the health of both its members and of the wider communities it serves. In the more than 35 years it has been in business, SelectHealth has worked to improve both the cost and quality of healthcare by providing an industry-leading, innovative health plan that enables high-value benefits and superior service at an affordable cost.
SelectHealth is a 2020 DBTA Database DevOps Innovation Award Winner
The Challenge
Like many healthcare organizations, SelectHealth’s IT team struggled to move quickly, while building innovative, high-quality experiences for customers, and to bring existing services to scale.
To accelerate application development, quickly onboard global partners, and revamp its organizational, regulatory, and compliance policies, SelectHealth pursued a platform-based approach.
In an initiative championed by John Tippetts, director, application development and IT infrastructure, SelectHealth, the company chose the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform to virtualize a variety of data sources, including SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP ASE, enabling it to provide custom data environment copies to those who need it. With built-in masking, the IT team can now deliver data to developers and partners within minutes, while upholding data privacy and security standards.
Before partnering with Delphix, SelectHealth saw rising capital spending on infrastructure to provide sufficient data environments (and still it typically took 4?5 days to grant access to data consumers), and lackluster global partner engagement due to data constraints.
Goals
Delphix’s mission is to empower businesses to accelerate innovation through data. In a world where every company is becoming a data company, the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform gives teams self-service access to secure, personal data environments to fuel application development, analytics, and AI while also minimizing data risk.
SelectHealth chose the Delphix DataOps platform with the goal of drastically decreasing data provisioning times in order to better capitalize on its wealth of data and better serve customers with a more seamless online insurance experience.
Delphix integration has allowed SelectHealth to solve these problems and achieve accelerated application development. Delphix has unlocked SelectHealth’s ability to create an unlimited number of custom data environments, which helps developers, QA, and test teams expand test coverage within the same time frames while ensuring better data quality by masking production data copies. SelectHealth has also increased overall data availability and reduced provisioning time for data consumers, including developers, QA, and testers, who now have access to data in minutes, rather than 4-5 days.
Metrics
According to SelectHealth, Delphix integration has eliminated refresh times to obtain newer, masked data, and has also facilitated accelerated partner engagement. SelectHealth’s IT department has significantly accelerated partner engagement by 10x (going from 5% to 50%) because organizational data compliance restrictions were consistently addressed for data sharing at the production site, which led to additional feature delivery at a lower cost. This 10x increase in partner engagement on projects led to additional feature delivery at a much lower cost.
Lessons Learned
SelectHealth’s partnership with Delphix began in 2017, and, according to the company, the impact on members is the most important benefit of this project. Getting things done faster—in minutes rather than days—and enabling partners globally means they are able to test in environments with realistic datasets, improve the quality of applications and, ultimately, provide a better experience for members.