For a Fortune 500 American healthcare company, stability and scalability had become urgent priorities. The data platform underpinning core operations was consuming more resources each year while struggling to keep pace with demand. Leadership recognized that the system could no longer sustain the business. What was needed was a transformation that would cut costs, restore reliability, and create a foundation ready to support the future.
The Challenges
A legacy system straining operations
For years, the client had depended on a legacy technology platform that had grown increasingly unstable, costly, and difficult to maintain. The system served as the foundation for critical operations across every line of business, with downstream dependencies spanning more than 1,500 systems and 170 departments. The complexity of the platform not only drove high operational and maintenance costs but also made migration activity exceptionally challenging for users.
The stakes were high. Every corner of the client’s organization was affected — all client LoBs and outside client payer entities from Advisory Services and Commercial Underwriting to Claims Operations, Fraud & Abuse, Clinical Services, and Payment Integrity verification. As instability grew and the cost of keeping the system afloat rose year after year, the client knew it was time for a change. The goal was not just modernization, but also to ensure adoption by thousands of stakeholders whose work was tightly woven into the platform.
The Turning Point
From legacy bottleneck to modern foundation
Recognizing the scale and sensitivity of the task, the client turned to Persistent to help reimagine their data platform. Persistent understood that modernization would only succeed if it addressed both the technical foundation and user adoption. A dual strategy was put into motion, optimize and modernize the platform while ensuring users are empowered to transition with confidence.
At the technical level, Persistent delivered a fully rearchitected environment that transformed decades of legacy structures into modern, cloud-ready solutions. Critical workloads written in JCL-COBOL were rearchitected into T-SQL, ensuring compatibility, performance, and long-term scalability. Legacy code and architecture were carefully re-engineered to remove inefficiencies and improve resource utilization. The modernization extended to existing ETL processes, where performance was enhanced to reduce bottlenecks and drive faster processing times.
The Outcomes
Stability, savings, and sustainable growth
With Persistent leading the transformation, the client achieved measurable outcomes that strengthened both their technology foundation and business operations. More than 1,500 users from 170 departments across all lines of business were successfully migrated, ensuring continuity for both internal functions and external payer entities.
Financially, the program delivered $7 million in annual cost savings, stemming from the retirement of expensive legacy infrastructure and the efficiencies gained through re-architecture. Performance and stability improved significantly, enabling better resource capacity optimization and ensuring that the platform could scale to meet future demands. Modernization of ETL processes further accelerated performance, reducing delays in critical workflows and providing end users with faster, more reliable data access.
By modernizing the platform with Persistent, the client was able to eliminate long-standing operational pain points, unlock millions in savings, and deliver a modern, stable foundation for growth. The result is not just a technical upgrade but a business transformation, one that empowers every department, strengthens payer relationships, and ensures that healthcare operations run reliably and efficiently for years to come.
