For a Fortune 500 American healthcare leader, data had long been the foundation of operations and decision-making. But the backbone supporting that data was showing its age. Costs were rising, scalability was limited, and the system was no longer keeping pace with the demands of a rapidly evolving industry. Leadership knew they needed to reimagine their approach, not just to protect critical processes today but to build a platform capable of driving insight and innovation well into the future.
The Challenges
A legacy backbone too costly to sustain
For more than two decades, the client relied on Teradata hosted on-premise to serve as the backbone of analytics and reporting. The platform powered more than 25 lines of business (LOBs), spanning everything from Medicare and retirement services to prescription management, fraud detection, actuarial models, and financial reporting, serving over 5,000 end users daily.
Despite its importance, the platform had become a bottleneck due to its rising costs, limited resiliency and the inability to scale, this threatened both day-to-day operations and long-term innovation. The organization faced the challenge of moving their decades of business-critical data without disrupting essential processes like regulatory reporting, claims management and trend analysis. They wanted end user and workload migration for core data marts, lakes & platforms.
The Turning Point
A decision to modernize, not just migrate
The client realized that a simple lift-and-shift wouldn’t deliver the benefits they needed and partnered with Persistent to help them design a cloud-first strategy that would not only migrate workloads but also empower users and unlock new opportunities for advanced analytics.
Persistent guided the migration of data assets that had been built and relied upon for decades. These included employee and individual records, Medicare & retirement information, prescriptions & labs, as well as datasets for member demographics, fraud analysis and actuarial modeling. All these were carefully migrated to Azure leveraging the capabilities of Databricks and Snowflake.
Persistent also modernized critical workloads that supported financial & regulatory reporting, while enhancing analytics capabilities to better understand and predict healthcare spending, utilization and financial outcomes. The formulary prescription drug list was also migrated along with processes for claims ingestion, validation, prioritization and recommendations.
At the same time, Persistent recognized the importance of supporting the people behind technology. With more than 5000 end users spread across 25 lines of businesses, we ensured adoption through open office hours, guided them to convert their workloads, queries and reports and enable them to leverage Gen AI tools to promote self-service. By focusing equally on technology and user enablement, the client was able to transition thousands of daily processes seamlessly.
The Outcomes
Cost savings, resiliency, and a future-ready platform
The transformation delivered measurable business impact:
- 100% user migration achieved, enabling full Teradata decommissioning
- $140 million in annual savings realized upon program completion
- 5,000+ end users successfully migrated without disruption
- Stronger resiliency, scalability and analytics capabilities to improve healthcare outcomes across federal, state, community, employer, and individual LOBs.
By modernizing critical data assets and workflows with Persistent’s expertise, the organization turned a decades-old legacy system into a cloud-powered analytics engine. The result is not only immediate cost savings
