Current Trends For Payers - The Tech Debt Dilemma: Why Cloud Operations Are Essential

"The operating infrastructure of health plans rely on technology to expedite processes, scale, react quickly to regulatory changes and changes in the market."

Technology debt is the cost of maintaining legacy software systems over time, often built in hard code. Updates and workarounds are expensive and the process for implementation is slow, but there's also the opportunity cost, business goals and timelines to consider. In order to adapt to the fast-paced landscape of today's health plan operations, plans need to be nimble and adaptable to change to stay competitive.

There are tool sets in the cloud that allow for innovation of processes, software products, and the ability to scale which wasn't previously available. There are many different ways to leverage the cloud and a spectrum of what it means to be cloud-native.  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) takes all the same servers, infrastructure, and architecture that's in place today, keeps it in-tact and runs it virtually in the cloud. For many this has a lot of benefits, scales, and can be optimized. The next step in the evolution on the spectrum is Platform as a Service (PaaS). This gets rid of the limitation of having the infrastructure and architecture lifted into the cloud and it builds an infrastructure through code by leveraging the cloud-native storage, tools, and technology as the platform itself for software services, products and applications—allowing for greater innovation capacity. PaaS allows for quick scaling, up or down,  enhanced automation and connectivity between development pipelines, heightened security, API management, governance and toolsets. Beyond the cloud's abundant flexibility, speed and configurability, it's a more cost-effective environment.

About Our Guest

Larry Moncol leads healthcare operations product software and technology platforms.