Oracle Customer Success—MediSwitch (Pty) Ltd.

MediSwitch Processes Several Hundred Thousand EDI Transactions per Day with a Single Database Administrator on Fully Serviced Infrastructure

With Oracle Database Appliance managed by Oracle Advanced Customer Support, we deploy, operate, and scale our business-critical systems with minimum effort and costs. This ensures maximum system availability for processing several hundred thousand electronic claims per day with the highest service levels.

— Wayne Botha, IT Manager, MediSwitch, a division of Altron TMT (Pty) Ltd.

MediSwitch, a division of Altron TMT (Pty) Ltd., occupies a leading position in the transmission of electronic healthcare transactions. Founded in 1993, MediSwitch enjoys national coverage through an extensive network of accredited dealers. The company pioneered electronic data interchange (EDI) for healthcare in South Africa and revolutionized practice administration with the SwitchOn claim submission and management process. In 1999, MediSwitch became the first company to offer online transactions to healthcare professionals in South Africa. Today, there are close to 30,000 healthcare professionals, as well as all retail pharmacies in South Africa, benefitting from MediSwitch’s electronic claims submission.

Business Challenge

Help provide comprehensive and affordable healthcare to every South African citizen by ensuring maximum service availability for electronic claims submissions, so that payments for services delivered by 30,000 healthcare professionals are accelerated
Allow for real-time bidirectional replication of the company’s pioneering EDI application used by healthcare professionals for electronic claims submissions to more than 60 medical schemes

Empower healthcare professionals and medical schemes to reduce administrative overhead and paper usage by providing fully redundant claims services from the point of origin—such as from a dentist, a pharmacy, or a hospital—of a medical services bill to the invoice receiver, for example a health insurance company
Set the benchmark in South Africa’s hotly contested healthcare services market in terms of electronic claims system uptime and service levels

Ensured strict compliance with service level agreements of 99.95% system uptime by ensuring 100% data warehouse availability since deploying Oracle Database Appliance, realizing an average of 23 million EDI transactions per month without any unplanned downtime since November 2013
Reduced total cost of ownership by 45%, decreased support requirements by 60%, and reduced time to complete upgrades by 80% as compared to the offerings an off-the-shelf server solution

Delivered high availability database services to healthcare professionals and insurers and achieved a 10% business growth per year—without spending a single dollar on supplementary hardware or software—a calculated 80% saving over three years
Lowered overall IT support requirements by a staggering 60% by relying solely on Oracle Advanced Customer Support for system maintenance, performance monitoring, and patching, freeing MediSwitch staff to focus on applications and professional services for South Africa’s booming healthcare industry—with only three service requests being issued since putting the appliances into operation
Ensured high-performance, low-impact, bidirectional data replication with subsecond latency between two Oracle Database Appliances located in separate datacenters with Oracle GoldenGate, providing system availability even if the network links between the two sites are interrupted
Provided consolidated reporting from a single database, running monthly billing reports in under 45 minutes on average, and running some reports in only 5 minutes by establishing synchronization across 2 active Oracle Database Appliances
Simplified infrastructure substantially by running all production, test, and development databases on Oracle Database Appliance, and enabled a single database administrator to manage production databases and Oracle GoldenGate replication with assistance from Oracle Advanced Customer Support, which freed highly qualified IT staff for strategic tasks such as exploring Oracle’s cloud technology
Ensured scalability on demand to increase transactional volumes and expand claims services by leveraging Oracle Database Appliance’s built-in upgrade path, where all CPUs are already in place and can be activated instantly as business demands require
Worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support to upgrade Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Database Appliance firmware with minimum disruption outside South African business hours, and a single slot of planned downtime for each upgrade

Oracle Database Appliance managed by Oracle Advanced Customer Support is a one-stop shop for our server infrastructure. It is the foundation for successfully growing our business with a lean and cost-efficient IT infrastructure. We could not have achieved that with any other vendor.

— Wayne Botha, IT Manager, MediSwitch, a division of Altron TMT (Pty) Ltd.