Modernizing data and analytics capabilities leads to 2.5x ROI

Our Impact 

A rapidly growing health plan set out to modernize core technology and operational foundations. It needed a scalable data foundation to onboard new business and evolve analytics capabilities to support growth, increase competitiveness, and manage increasing operational costs. 

The client sought to build a central foundation of clean, standardized data to support consistent and accurate decisions while also elevating analytics maturity with advanced analytics supplementing existing workflows. Activating this high-impact, seamless platform would empower our client to target scalable year-over-year growth. 

West Monroe helped our client articulate the value of data capability maturity on the broader organization—and drive from strategy to execution. We helped the organization build trust in its data, uncover innovation opportunities, and establish scalable patterns and practices to match strategic growth ambitions. We helped track value creation to realize returns of the new data and analytics capabilities.  

The Full Story 

The Challenge 

Anticipating substantial growth, our client wanted to improve its data platform. The previous system didn’t provide a platform capable of quality data management or consistent governance and stewardship—which made scaling operations all but impossible.  

A lack of data was preventing the client from making insight-driven decisions. Technology debt had also become an increasing concern due to a growing collection of disconnected tools. After reviewing our client’s IT infrastructure, West Monroe helped create a fully functional data platform, setting the foundation for IT upgrades and expansion. Our approach allowed our client to develop a unified vision for digital transformation and enabled the strategy to bring them to the finish line. 

An Undeniably Different Approach  

Our client wanted to empower their organization with a truly digital data platform integrated in a scalable tech foundation. To help them do this, we brought together multidisciplinary expertise in product engineering, organizational change management, healthcare and life sciences, and external data partners. This expertise helped us define and develop a data strategy that would help our client leverage market-leading tools.  

In addition to being the foundation of our approach in all engagements, our diversity of skills, knowledge, and expertise allowed us to rectify misalignments between people and processes identified during discovery. To address this, West Monroe fully integrated into our client’s team, working alongside them to gain a deeper understanding of their challenges. This enabled us to implement a solution specifically tailored to our client’s needs.  
 
Our approach began with system design and a focus on obtaining alignment from IT stakeholders to ensure the platform would meet organizational needs—both current and future. A few of the decisive moments during our engagement included: 

• Solution design and implementation: We worked with key stakeholders to define a data strategy and implemented a data platform consisting of a Data Lake, Integrated Layer, and Consumption Layer. The platform required retooled data governance to include operating model acceleration, expansion, and optimization. 
• Data & analytics strategy: We carefully assessed hosting and tooling options to steer client leadership toward strategic alignment on migrating core data capabilities to the cloud, leveraging a multi-layer analytics architecture.  
• Business case and value tracking: We partnered with client SMEs to develop a business case presenting a conservative estimate of 2.5x ROI. The plan would reduce operating costs and open new analytics-supported revenue streams across health plan functions including pharmacy, care management, and utilization management.  
• Change management & training: Due to the organization-wide impacts, a fundamental element of our process was change management. We supervised change management design, execution, and monitoring leading to increased program effectiveness.  
• Build & implementation: We supported a domain-based, phased migration to the new cloud-based data platform, expediating its business use. With the first 50% of the data platform complete, the team ingested data from three major source systems and 30 ad-hoc sources. The data was then modeled into 45+ tables for business users to consume; the team will continue to double these efforts over the next 10 months. 

Real Results  

West Monroe does more than implement technology and advise our partners—we enable them to be self-sufficient. During the engagement, we coached our client to develop their own strategic advisory capabilities. We also worked with them to build sustainable business practices that will allow them to keep building on their digital strategy into the future. Our work has: 

• Improved organizational trust in data 
• Improved data quality  
• Reduced time spent on reporting & analysis  
• Created new opportunities for innovation 
• Enabled growth by scaling data processes 
• Improved safeguards around client data assets  

Our priority was to move the needle in a measurable way—and that’s what we helped accomplish. The project is expected to deliver an ROI of 2.5x over five years. The client can also expect to save $10 million and 122,000+ person-hours across the organization each year. And while these short-term results are exciting, the most compelling results will be the long-term impacts of their transformation into a truly digital organization.