Perficient is at the forefront of managing and developing applications for numerous clients in the Healthcare sector. This article focuses on the Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) company, exploring the challenges such a company faces, the value it provides to its clientele, and how Perficient leverages its talent **** of business analysts, developers, architects, and process managers to provide technical solutions to address their needs.
A PBM company collaborates with various government entities, employers, and insurance companies to manage, administer, and execute prescription **** benefits within health plans. Their primary goal is to optimize the management of prescription *****, bring in cost efficiency, and pass the benefit downstream to the end-users, the patients.
The Perficient team is working for a prominent PBM company that manages prescription benefits for millions of individuals across various segments.
Major Challenges
Complex and huge volumes of data pose major challenges, a few of which are as follows:
Data Sourcing Complexity
Collating data from disparate sources like Pharmacy systems, Healthcare providers, Insurance claims, Patient records, and Clinical trials is a formidable task. Integrating such diverse data requires robust systems to maintain its accuracy, completeness & consistency.
Data Analyses
To get insights from such vast and diverse data sets, an appropriate analytical tool is essential. Ensuring that crisp information reaches the users is of utmost importance.
Scalability Demands
As the volume of data grows, the systems have to handle & manage the data without compromising on performance.
Regulatory Compliance Obligations
Healthcare must comply with various laws and regulations, for example, HIPPA, which makes it essential that the systems, vendors, and processes managing the sensitive data are also compliant.
How are AWS ETL Services Used to Overcome the Challenges
AWS ETL services offer powerful solutions to tackle such challenges. Let us walk through the challenges and services in brief.
Unified data cataloging
For the disparate sources, AWS Glue Crawlers creates a searchable catalog of datasets, tables, and their associated schemas. This helps in organizing the data in a logical structure and provides data access controls.
Organized Data Storage
AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) stores the structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data. The data is organized and stored based on source, ****, or some relevant criteria. S3 provides availability, security, and scalability, all of which come at a significantly low cost.
Transformation using PySpark
Employing PySpark within AWS Glue jobs helps in creating transformations to clean, enrich, and customize data as required. PySpark helps in performing fast distributed transformations on large data sets. AWS DMS (Data Migration Service) also facilitates moving data into Redshift with ease.
Automated ETL trigger
AWS EventBridge triggers the AWS Lambda based on events, which in turn initiates a job. This ensures timely processing of data and avoids manual errors.
Data Analytics
Amazon Redshift stores the enriched data, which facilitates high-performance analytics and querying. Various analytical tools like AWS QuickSight connect to Redshift to bring out user insights.
Performance Monitoring on the Cloud
AWS CloudWatch serves as a vigilant monitoring tool that provides alarms and logs for tracking and analysis of ETL job performance metrics, ensuring efficient and optimized workflows.
Regulatory Compliance
AWS provides security features, encryption & access controls, audit and monitoring tools, and physical and environmental controls. Such AWS features, in combination with policies & procedures followed at Perficient, ensure strict adherence to the regulatory framework of the Healthcare sector.
Scalability
AWS provides EC2 instances that can be scaled up or down. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) ensures dynamic scaling to manage varying levels of traffic, enhancing app availability. AWS Lambda provides serverless computing & scales based on the number of requests. Amazon Redshift supports on-demand scaling to enhance performance, storage, and computing.
Perficient + Healthcare Data
The Perficient team delivers a diverse talent **** crucial for our clients’ success.
The experts working with the PBM client specialize in:
- Discovery process
- Crafting robust data ******
- Creating design and defining architectures
- Developing AWS Data pipelines & infrastructure on AWS
- Generating BI reports for comprehensive reporting
- Efficient testing of the pipelines
- Automated deployment methods
- Process teams that follow Agile methodology
This ensures seamless implementations, enhanced data integrations for efficient management of crucial information, continuous optimization of code, flexible scalability based on business needs, cost optimizations, and improved processes around planning & implementation, ultimately empowering the PBM organization with better data insights.
