Blue Cross Blue Shield of California, a leading health insurance provider, is committed to moving its data infrastructure to the cloud by 2030. They recognise the power of data-driven decision making. They want to empower their diverse teams by moving away from legacy on-prem providers and working with Cloud Data storage.
The Challenge: Bringing Data to the Masses
Blue Shield of California recognized that data should not be siloed within the domain of a few technical experts. Instead, they wanted to democratize access, enabling a wide range of employees – from actuaries and underwriters to program managers and marketing teams – to explore, analyze, and collaborate on critical data.
Blue Shield of California faced several challenges in its cloud migration journey:
– Complex Data Architecture: The organization maintained a complex data architecture across cloud and on-premise databases in various departments.
– Data Integrity and Security: Ensuring data integrity and security during the transfer was paramount due to the sensitive nature of healthcare data.
– Resource Optimization: Blue Shield realized that when migrating data from on-prem to the cloud, given the increasing demand from employees, they needed a product that worked with both types of databases.
That means BCBS initially had a strong request for the ability to work cross-team on common projects with large amounts of data from different specialists.
The Solution: DBeaver Enterprise, DBeaver Team Edition
After evaluating various database management tools, Blue Shield of California selected DBeaver Enterprise as their universal data exploration and analysis platform in 2019. The decision was driven by DBeaver’s intuitive interface, broad database compatibility, and the ability to connect seamlessly with their existing data infrastructure. And also not least because BCBS is constantly working with Snowflake, Databricks, and Netezza databases, and they are all available in our tool.
The implementation of DBeaver Enterprise Edition at Blue Shield of California has yielded impressive results:
1. Democratized Data Access: Nearly 1000 company’s employees now leverage DBeaver regularly, enabling a wide range of users to access and analyze data directly. This has fostered a data-centric culture where informed decision-making is the norm.
2. Improved Efficiency: DBeaver’s streamlined features, such as efficient querying, visualization, and data management capabilities, have translated to faster turnaround times for critical tasks and better data-driven decision-making.
3. Enhanced Collaboration: The ability to share queries and reports within DBeaver has facilitated seamless collaborations across departments, enabling knowledge sharing and ensuring that everyone is working with the latest insights. In this regard, a useful new feature for the company in 2022 was Data Transfer. This function was introduced in the 22.3 version of DBeaver. It has also been utilized by the client’s specialists to streamline its data management processes.
As Blue Shield of California are in transition from on premesises to fully running on cloud platforms and the number of internal users is growing the company has moved to DBeaver Team Edition in early 2024. This product allows different users from the same team to connect via Cloud Explorer with cloud db’s like MongoDB on Azure, which these customers often interact with. All these benefits are multiplied by moving to a more team centric tool.
Securing data-driven healthcare with ongoing technical support
The successful implementation of DBeaver Enterprise and then Team Edition by Blue Shield of California could not have been without a data security review. Customer places a strong focus on robust protection and responsive technical support. Essentially, the former ensures data protection and the latter provides the Blue Shield with answers to complex questions when needed. The company, starting in 2019, received rapid responses from our technical support team.
For example, when the global log4j outage occurred in 2021, Blue Shield of California was worried about the safety of the data in its AWS Redshift databases. However, as our tool is protected against external vulnerabilities, the customer’s data remains safe.
Conclusion
A case study from Blue Shield of California shows how DBeaver Enterprise deployment provided access to data across the organization. When the number of users reached almost a thousand of their employees in various roles such as actuaries, underwriters, programme managers and marketing teams, the company decided to switch to a more advanced collaborative product. BCBS realised that large teams with diverse backgrounds needed a tool with the ability to create new projects, assign roles and a separate feature to connect to cloud databases, it moved to Team Edition. Accordingly, among the main results are also increased efficiency through optimised queries and data management.
Thank you for exploring our case study with Blue Shield of California, but the company’s specialists are not our only customers who enjoy the benefits of working with our tools. We hope to share more stories with you soon.
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