Why Oracle Database to Oracle Cloud project in NHIF was a Great Success?
The Customer
National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) is the public sector entity in Bulgaria responsible for maintaining all national payments for healthcare services. Bulgaria has a compulsory model for health insurance, and practically all healthcare services provided by physicians, general practitioners, hospitals, pharmacies, etc., are managed by the critical information systems on NHIF. The same systems are also the source of the primary data needed to facilitate the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.
The Challenge
The NHIF has struggled with inconsistent performance for many years due to a complex and legacy IT infrastructure maintained with unpredictable costs. In addition, the lack of a Disaster Recovery strategy and policies for such critical systems was also a considerable challenge to guaranteeing the availability of the services and compliance with strict regulations in the sector.
As the NHIF plays a central role in spending public funds, the efficiency and transparency of the costs are significant factors when evaluating their investments. The organization needed to improve its services through very well-justified benefits from a technical perspective and a business, financial, and regulatory compliance point of view.
The Projects
Leveraging our expertise in Oracle Cloud Platform Data Management and in Oracle Database to Oracle Cloud, we built, together with the local Oracle team, a strong business case for the consolidation of all databases of the critical systems on Exadata Cloud@Customer as the most suitable platform for NHIF. The first project for the production site was very successful and proved the best approach to this model. After experiencing all the benefits, NHIF decided to trust us again by building its Disaster Recovery on 2nd box of Exadata Cloud@Customer, relying on the same contractor.
The Results
Having both sites on the same technology, the NHIF will have the flexibility to utilize their recourses better by using a single pool of Oracle Universal Credits for both machines. They have guaranteed performance with the option to increase their resources for periodical peaks and temporarily relocate resources for critical tasks. All this without compromising the business continuity and high availability of the services provided to many stakeholders in the healthcare sector.
With the current project, we managed to ultimately convert NHIF from on-premise to cloud, a highly innovative approach for a public sector entity in our region.
The first outcome was consolidating the production databases on Exadata Cloud@Customer. As a result, the National Health Insurance Fund dramatically increased its performance with a much higher level of security and manageability. This result was achieved with 14M EUR savings - more than 80% less cost compared to the alternative of classic on-premise HW and license approach.
The first success has led to the next step – the current project for expanding with 2nd box of Exadata Cloud@Customer for Disaster Recovery. It will guarantee business continuity and high availability of critical systems nationwide to the NHIF. This will lead to better healthcare services for Bulgarian citizens, which is crucial now with all challenges, including the pandemic. And again, with much better TCO and the flexibility of the OPEX model.
The best feedback from National Health Insurance Fund is that they continue to trust Oracle and Sirma to be their advisors in implementing the best and the most innovative technologies to serve their operations.
