Federal healthcare agencies are pushing forward on modernizing their IT systems with the goal of providing better care and health services for patients, but the journey is anything but short, or easy.

What’s the biggest obstacle? Data.

Framing Challenges, Finding Solutions

Known as the “Silicon Valley” of Federal healthcare, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center (CMMI) is chartered with improving the quality of healthcare while reducing the cost for beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

NewWave Telecom & Technologies, a leading digital services provider, partnered with CMMI to bring actual Silicon Valley cloud solutions into the Federal government and meet this challenge head-on.

CMMI needed NewWave’s help to design, test, and deploy an IT system that enables the flexibility, concurrency, and scale required to build innovative models of healthcare delivery and payment systems with the goal of delivering the highest quality of care while managing costs.

Together with Snowflake, a cloud data platform service, the companies collaborated on a game-changing, multi-year contract to build the cloud data platform that CMMI needs. Promising innovative payment and service delivery models that provide better care and health benefits, these innovative models are catalyzing a revolution in healthcare across the public and private sector by providing tangible solutions for improving the value of healthcare for everyone.

Getting Started

To get started, CMMI – which has one of the largest, most complex healthcare databases in the world – needed a better way to manage its data. And it needed a solution that could quickly operationalize and scale to its environment and meet unique data management requirements.

CMMI needed to test various payment and service delivery models that aim to achieve better care for patients, better health for our communities, and lower costs through improvement for our healthcare system to deliver on its mission.

NewWave and CMMI quickly integrated Snowflake’s cloud data platform service with virtually infinite scalability and high resiliency into the technology stack – enabling CMMI to operationalize its system without a large upfront investment or management. NewWave’s solution, paired with Snowflake’s technology, allows payment model creators, testers, stakeholders, policymakers, and innovators to quickly test and iterate models with the utmost flexibility.

Reaping the Benefits

The benefits are clear to the agency. Using the technology, CMMI can automatically scale compute as needed, allowing it to see unique, cost-effective levels of performance in real time.

Delivering the right data, at the right time, in the right format, to the right people is critical to the agency. As a result of the implementation, NewWave built a fully managed cloud service that reduces and/or eliminates traditional administrative tasks that previously existed. Further reducing costs, CMMI can easily scale both storage and compute independently and automatically, eliminating the need for any “sizing” effort or pre-purchasing resources.

America is on the cusp of radical change for healthcare delivery and payment systems – NewWave and Snowflake are making that change possible. NewWave and Snowflake have laid the foundation for this data transformation and expect to have a fully functioning innovation health data platform in early 2020. By providing the working models of value-based care, the organizations aim to spark a healthcare rejuvenation that eliminates traditional fee-for-service healthcare.

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Kate Polit
Kate Polit
Kate Polit is MeriTalk's Assistant Copy & Production Editor covering the intersection of government and technology.
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