About Casenet

Casenet provides a comprehensive suite of enterprise care management software and services solutions for commercial, Medicaid, Medicare, TPA, provider/ACO, and specialty provider organizations that have multiple lines of business and that require comprehensive configurations for each member population. Healthcare organizations rely on Casenet’s population health management solutions to improve care coordination and the quality and delivery of care through enhanced case, disease, utilization, and home and community-based services management. Casenet’s solutions empower organizations to adapt quickly to changing market and regulatory dynamics, and to identify and target populations having unique risk characteristics with specific care management programs—taking the first step toward better individual health and total population health management.

The Challenge

Healthcare organizations depend on Casenet’s application, TruCare, for personalized care management. TruCare is a highly customizable product with peak utilization during healthcare open enrollment, which is a period of a couple months each year. In the on-premises environment, customers must provision the number of servers required to cover these two months of increased load. While this works, this means that much of that server capacity sits idle for ten months of the year, draining management time and money.

Casenet wanted to change this for their customers. To get started, Casenet decided to embark on a cloud migration proof-of-concept for TruCare that focused on scalability, automation, and establishing a solid cloud foundation. Casenet was introduced to 1Strategy through TEKsystems Global Services, and the lift-and-shift of TruCare began.

Why Amazon Web Services

Casenet’s customers were increasingly inquiring about cloud offerings. Because Centene—Casenet’s parent company—has already been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement new microservices for their healthcare systems, they knew that AWS could give them the on-demand scaling they needed, plus high availability and well-isolated customer environments. Casenet felt inspired to create a cloud environment that could be used for a proof-of-concept migration of the current architecture, with an eye towards an eventual re-architecture that would use microservices to support large and small customers alike. Casenet selected AWS because of its ability to auto scale with the computing needs of our customers, and due to the cost efficiency of many of its cloud services.

Additionally, AWS offers extensive support for high availability and HIPAA compliance, both must-haves for the Casenet team. Through collaboration with 1Strategy, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Casenet was able to build a platform in AWS for customers to leverage in the future and deliver a proof-of-concept migration of their critical application. According to Hussam Zawil, Casenet’s director of software development, “Casenet has been planning to transition its applications to the Cloud and needed the type of AWS expertise 1Strategy offers to be successful.”

The Benefits

1Strategy’s collaboration with Casenet started from the ground up: creating a new account and organization structure that would promote ease-of-management and thorough isolation of customer workloads. After designing the account structure, AWS Control Tower was leveraged to jump-start the implementation. With one click of a button, AWS Control Tower provides a single-sign-on solution (AWS SSO), separate permission sets for various users (admins, power users, finance team members, and the like), security guardrails, automated account provisioning, and centralized security logging and billing. This meant that valuable time could be spent on finessing security guardrails instead of tedious, manual account creation and configuration.

With the account structure in place, a network architecture was next on the list. By using AWS Transit Gateway, a variety of other network components, and Route 53, 1Strategy was able to design a network that allowed for seamless connectivity and DNS resolution between the on-premises and AWS environment. Couple that with components to support encryption at rest and in transit (using AWS KMS and AWS Certificate Manager), and Casenet had a solid foundation upon which to build.

The focus then turned to the TruCare application, a single-tenant, traditional Windows application that utilizes a variety of VMs, file shares, and SQL Server databases. Aside from the quality and features the TruCare app offers, it also provides a high degree of customization to meet customers’ needs. This meant that Casenet needed a simple, repeatable way to stand up multiple TruCare environments for each customer, but in a way that would eventually allow for easy scaling and customization.

This kind of use case is tailor-made for a robust infrastructure-as-code solution, and using Terraform to create the Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon FSx file systems, and assorted databases and load balancers gave Casenet the repeatability they were after. Additionally, the infrastructure makes use of AWS Database Migration Service for easy database replication, as well as Amazon EC2 Autoscaling groups. Right now, those autoscaling groups are used to ensure high availability of various components; in the future, as TruCare components are refactored to support horizontal scaling, they will be used to dynamically scale the app in response to load. “By migrating Casenet’s applications to AWS, we will be able to provide high-availability and scalability while reducing costs,” said Zawil. “We will also be able to optimize and automate our deployment strategy into the Cloud which will significantly reduce our implementation time for new customers.”

Ultimately this will give TruCare the desired resiliency and cost-effectiveness, along with all the other pieces that are “table stakes” in the healthcare context: customer isolation, security, and HIPAA compliance. Plus, by partnering with 1Strategy, the Casenet team’s knowledge of and ability with AWS grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the project. The end result? Casenet is now well-positioned to leverage their new expertise, new AWS foundation, and new proof-of-concept to take the TruCare application to the next level.

Zawil expressed that “in a short time, we were able to develop a POC of the lift-and-shift for our core product TruCare which was completed on-time.” He continues, “Our engagement with 1Strategy has been very pleasant and rewarding in that we built the platform for TruCare in AWS and acquired the core AWS skills to move to the next step of our cloud strategy.”

About 1Strategy

1Strategy is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner, focusing exclusively on AWS. 1Strategy helps businesses architect, migrate, and optimize their workloads on AWS, creating scalable, cost-effective, secure, and reliable solutions. 1Strategy also helps customers get real value from their data using comprehensive machine learning models and artificial intelligence. 1Strategy holds the AWS DevOps, Migration, Data & Analytics, Well Architected, and Machine Learning Competencies, and is a partner of the AWS Public Sector Program. With experts having deployed AWS solutions since 2007, 1Strategy is a leader in custom training—providing customers with the knowledge, tools, and best practices to manage those solutions over time. 1Strategy is a TEKsystems Global Services company with teams in Seattle and Salt Lake City, supporting customers throughout the US and across every vertical.  

Learn More

For more information about how 1Strategy can assist your company migrate to AWS, optimize AWS solutions including security and backup strategies, and receive custom training, visit 1Strategy.com.

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