Healthcare.gov in “Perfect Health” with Terracotta Bigmemory
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Terracotta In-Memory Data Fabric Platform
- BigMemory
Tech Stack
- Java
- JBoss
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
HealthCare.gov is the official website of the U.S. Affordable Care Act. It is used by Americans to compare prices of health insurance plans, begin plan enrollment and find out if they qualify for government healthcare subsidies. The site was designed to assist millions of uninsured Americans. However, when the site went live on Oct. 1, 2013, it was over budget and unreliable, fraught with technical difficulties. Citizens had only from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31 to use the site to compare insurance options and sign up for 2014. The site is of great importance as it is used by millions of Americans to plan their healthcare needs.
The Challenge
HealthCare.gov, the official website of U.S. Affordable Care Act, was launched in 2013 to assist millions of uninsured Americans. However, the site was over budget and unreliable, fraught with technical difficulties. Citizens had only from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31 to use the site compare insurance options and sign up for 2014. The unexpectedly high number of visitors began to overload the site’s infrastructure. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrambled for answers from a variety of sources, including internal government experts, external programmers and industry partner, Software AG. The main challenge was to rapidly improve the performance of the website, assure a stable and scalable platform— especially during peak buying season, and increase site reliability so that no data’s lost.
The Solution
Software AG determined a lack of in-memory data caching was slowing website performance and recommended BigMemory, the core component of Software AG’s Terracotta platform. With Terracotta in place, HealthCare.gov performs like a workhorse. At the height of each enrollment season, the site expands into one of the world’s largest enterprise transaction-based sites, enabling millions to get the insurance they need. Terracotta enhanced what government teams were doing behind the scenes to expand the site’s hardware and storage platforms to accommodate more users. HealthCare.gov was able to rapidly expand its memory fabric platform horizontally and vertically by adding both more memory and more machines to the infrastructure. During open enrollment in 2016, HealthCare.gov expanded again to 44 Terracotta nodes, supporting 315 JBoss servers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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