Creating a more effective, scalable healthcare system

Surescripts serves the nation with the single most trusted and capable health information network, built to increase patient safety, lower costs and ensure quality care. The company was founded in 2001 with a mission to build a nationwide network connecting clinicians, EHRs, hospitals, pharmacy benefits managers, pharmacies, and technology vendors, to replace paper prescriptions with more accurate e-prescribing. Today, Surescripts connects more than 1 million healthcare professionals and delivers comprehensive patient information to the point of care, including nearly 11 billion transactions annually.

Summary

The Surescripts network grounds its strength in two core beliefs: that more actionable patient intelligence at critical points of care means better decisions, and that better decisions mean lower cost, higher quality, and increased safety.

As its network and services continue to expand, Surescripts is also embarking on the transition of moving away from the expensive, inflexible legacy database system to a modernized, efficient, and scalable architecture better suited to address the latest data management needs.

The Challenge

For Surescripts, the rapid expansion of its network and customer base introduced significant growth in the number of transactions they process. The large volume of data pushed the boundary of their legacy relational database system both architecturally and economically. In addition, to meet the customers demanding SLAs, Surescripts has stringent requirements on the reliability of the data management system – no more than 1.5 hours of downtime per year is allowed. The company quickly realized that adding more systems and data centers to meet such requirements is not sustainable with its current database infrastructure. Cost aside, the complexities and synchronizations will progressively increase if they operate with their present data management systems.

Surescripts decided to take a fundamentally different approach to address these new challenges.

The Solution

Surescripts selected DataStax DSE as its data management platform of choice since it serves as an always-on data management platform. With DSE, Surescripts can power their pending transaction service. Surescripts relies on the core component of their electronic prescription transaction processing switch and acts as the frontline online transaction and processing (OLTP) layer that tracks all the transaction metadata. This data essentially boils down to what transformation applied to the messages flowing back & forth at the various touchpoints such as clinic and pharmacy or clinic and insurance payer. Such visibility allows Surescripts to audit a transaction throughout its entire journey. DataStax Enterprise (DSE) replaced their legacy relational database system and is now used to store critical sections of electronic submission.

The final decision came down to DSE for its always-on, linear scalability, and built-in enterprise security features required by Surescripts. In addition, DSE provides higher operational efficiency with features such as built-in replication and online upgrade, therefore enabling significant increases in both scale and reliability over other alternatives.

DSE has been running very smoothly since the very beginning. It’s been so quiet that we have not had to get more people involved to manage the cluster because it just works.

Keith Willard
Chief Architect at Surescripts

The Results

DSE has been running smoothly upon its deployment into the production at Surescripts. The benefits started to manifest immediately in the following areas:

• Greatly simplified multi-data center support over the legacy relational system
• Scalability headspace gain with DSE’s linear scalability
• Increased operational efficiency with OpsCenter – an intuitive, web-based visual management and monitoring solution integrated within DSE
• Advanced security with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and LDAP integration ensures the data stored in DSE is HIPAA and PII compliant

Next Steps

In the upcoming months, Surescripts will be expanding DSE capacity to address the growing volume of their transactions. Meanwhile, in addition to more data stores in the DSE environment to support new use cases, the company plans on getting more users trained to take advantage of the modern data management platform.