MEDIMPACT HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS, INC: LIFERAY

OVERVIEW

MedImpact HealthCare Systems, Inc., is the nation’s largest full-service Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). The company drives revenue through independent drug benefit management rather than benefit management with conflicting interests due to drug fulfillment. MedImpact uses information technology and human capital to improve the practice of managed care pharmacy.

MedImpact partners with the nation’s finest health plans, hospitals, and employers to provide pharmacy benefit management services to more than 35 million members. Clients include corporations and employers, unions, managed care organizations, health plans, insurance carriers and third-party administrators, as well as local, state and federal employee programs. Founded in 1989, MedImpact is a private company with offices in San Diego, Calif. and a state-of-the-art call and operations center in Tempe, Ariz.

CHALLENGE

MedImpact works with hundreds of organizations to provide pharmacy benefits. While benefit programs have many features in common, each program has a unique combination of offerings for its members. For example, programs may optionally include consumer-directed tools such as spending accounts, cash discount cards, member websites, or a health management system. Delivering a custom website for each organization’s operations staff and their members is critical.

In addition to the variability of individual benefit programs, MedImpact must comply with a wide spectrum of federal, state, and local regulations. For instance, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide guidelines for eligibility, enrollment, and dis-enrollment in Prescription Drug Benefit Plans; websites must follow standards in terms of prescriptive language as well as for people with disabilities as specified by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The rapidly changing face of healthcare regulations in the U.S. has only increased the complexity of compliance.

Over time, MedImpact has extensively invested in systems to meet the needs of clients and regulators. These systems were built using traditional website techniques and effectively met current needs. However, as the need for more client sites rose—along with the need for supporting new regulatory and market requirements—the company realized it was time for a different approach.

RESOLUTION

After extensive evaluation and research, MedImpact selected Liferay Portal as the base platform for new development and delivery of access to existing systems. MedImpact found the Liferay Portal framework to be a solid, industry standard and scalable solution that easily met the needs of the organization. Liferay scales well and eases the burden on IT, both in terms of performance and also in terms of operational self-service.

MedImpact selected XTIVIA, Inc. to help guide and accelerate integration of the Liferay portal into these environments. The goal was to develop a portal strategy that could be easily replicated across many sites, providing self-service content management to the business users and saving on costly IT labor. Much of the work focused on centralized authentication and authorization control, provision of custom look and feel, and architecting a pattern for future sites. Some of the detailed highlights include:

• Design and implementation of single sign-on (SSO)
• Integration of existing applications into portal with SSO
• Integration of LDAP into Liferay, with ongoing user and group data synchronization • Development of a comprehensive test suite and performance of end-to-end SSO testing
• Development of a login portlet and autologin filters
• Implementation of custom portlets and custom-themed styling
• Leveraging velocity templates to create dynamic web content

XTIVIA provided advice in many different areas, ranging from short-term tactical suggestions to long-term planning and direction. For instance, XTIVIA advised on the configuration of development, QA, staging, and production environments, as well as the performance tuning of the production cluster. XTIVIA provided MedImpact with the professional experience they needed, based on lessons learned over many engagements and deployments. The team also developed plans for future deployment and replication of environments—and it was all done in a way that fostered the transfer of knowledge to MedImpact.

VALUE ADDED

MedImpact expects the Liferay portal solution to accomplish their long-term objectives. Prior to Liferay, site content management required expensive IT software engineering resources to implement compliance and marketing content changes. As MedImpact moves all current web properties to Liferay, the company’s compliance, marketing, and client engagement teams can create and modify content and submit it for approval. This results in lower operational costs in the areas of new private-label sites and maintenance of current sites. MedImpact has plans to migrate all of its web portal technology to Liferay in the near future.

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