Blue Cross NC improves efficiencies, cost savings with Red Hat automation and container technologies

Overview

To achieve its vision of making healthcare simpler and more affordable for customers, health insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina needed to change its delivery model. With help from Red Hat, the provider switched to an in-house IT environment that offers more control, agility, and workload mobility. It also implemented a container-based platform offering automation capabilities and consistency across its hybrid environment. Now, Blue Cross NC can make more data-driven decisions faster, with improved efficiencies and reduced costs.

In order to shift to a more responsive IT environment, Blue Cross NC sought a platform-agnostic solution with automation capabilities in a public cloud application that also could help improve visibility and reduce costs. The health insurer was using a costly third-party managed services provider that often took weeks to provision a single virtual machine. Additionally, employees were handling various repetitive tasks instead of working on more dynamic, innovative projects.

Through an engagement with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, Blue Cross NC built its in-house IT environment on Red Hat OpenShift running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With help from a Red Hat Technical Account Manager, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training, the organization replaced its managed service provider with in-house IT talent, migrated 100+ services and 250+ applications to a container-based platform, and deployed 200,000+ human-readable Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform playbooks in just two years.

Software and Services

Red Hat® OpenShift®

Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux®

Red Hat Satellite 

Red Hat Technical Account Management

Red Hat Consulting

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs

Red Hat Training

By shifting to an in-house digital IT environment, Blue Cross NC now can make data-driven decisions faster. Using Red Hat Ansible Automation, it has cut the amount of time it takes to provision a virtual machine from 20+ hours to just 30 minutes, saving an estimated US$850,000. The provider also has executed 200,000+ human-readable Ansible playbooks over the past two years, saving 70,000 work hours in the process. Using this hybrid approach also allows Blue Cross NC to avoid vendor lock-in and offer workload mobility, so any of its applications can run anywhere.