Healthcare/Insurance

Express Scripts

Tools Used:
CORBA®, orb2™, Stratus, Hewlett-Packard, 
Alpha VAX, and Microsoft Windows and NT

Description:
Express Scripts is one of the nation's largest pharmacy benefits management (PBM) companies, delivering comprehensive clinically-based managed healthcare services to more than 47 million lives, with 10,000 different
plan sponsors, including managed care organizations, third-party administrators, insurance companies, unions, and large employers.

Problem:
When Express Scripts acquired two other firms and became the nation's largest independent pharmacy benefits management company, its biggest challenge was how to quickly integrate diverse IT systems without affecting customer service.

With the acquisition of ValueRX and Diversified Pharmaceutical Services, Express Scripts inherited an extremely diverse computing environment. It quickly needed an IT solution that would integrate multiple legacy systems in a non-disruptive manner while allowing for future growth.

Excellent customer service is a major competitive factor in health care, and is vital for growing market share and controlling costs. Express Scripts wanted to provide state-of-the-art customer service to pharmacies submitting coverage requests online and to consumers and medical personnel phoning the company's call centers for information. In addition, it wanted a flexible and easy-to-use Web site so customers could interact with the company via the Internet.

To meet these goals, the company needed an IT solution that would be fast to deploy and not disrupt business at its six U.S. locations. In addition, its existing legacy systems contained years of business knowledge that would be impossible to replicate or replace, so any solution would have to preserve them and make the information contained within them accessible across the organization.

Solution:
Express Scripts embraced CORBA as its component development, and integration standard because of its ability to support multiple platforms. This was essential to the firm because of the variety of its back-end platforms, including a mission-critical claims-processing system that utilized Stratus servers. CORBA allows multiple languages for front and back ends, allowing Express Scripts' call centers to continue utilizing Visual Basic 5 as their presentation layer, but deploying HTML on the Web site.

An added benefit was that CORBA had been embraced by the Council of Prescription Drug Programs as the next-generation standard for communicating transactions. Eventually, a standardized set of CORBA-based transaction formats will allow linkage among pharmacies and other health-care companies.

Express Scripts decided to use the CORBA standard because it supported all of the firm's back-end environments-- Stratus, Hewlett-Packard, Alpha VAX, and Microsoft Windows and NT. orb2 offered a standard integration layer that would do two things: superimpose a distributed, integrated business solution over the existing legacy systems and allow the orderly migration to a single-system solution. The system architecture is loosely coupled - the front end can be swapped without changing the business logic or data-access layer or vice versa.

orb2 speeds time to market for new products, increases development productivity, maintains business continuity, and reduces IT costs. It is a scaleable, reliable, high-performance object-oriented execution environment that integrates information from multiple platforms across complex organizations. Express Scripts valued its ability to integrate many diverse systems while preserving customer service.

"It's essential for us to integrate diverse systems from businesses we have acquired, and to use the Internet to provide access to business partners. As a result, our applications must span multiple front-end and back-end platforms," explained Dale Chamberlain, chief technology officer at Express Scripts in St. Louis. "The CORBA technology base allows us to integrate multiple systems in a scalable, non-disruptive way."

Express Scripts has deployed the CORBA-based system across its diverse systems, meeting its goals of integrating systems and preserving the company’s record of excellent customer service. Bottom-line results come from the company's new ability to accommodate IT growth easily and maintain high levels of customer service.