TwoFour Foundation & Remedy Analytics: A Case Study CLIENT: Remedy Analytics: Prescription Benefit Solutions CHALLENGE: To quickly develop a quality advanced analytics solution that delivers predictive, cost saving modelling algorithms to the payers of pharmacy benefit management services SOLUTION: TwoFour Foundation: a development and runtime platform for building & deploying global, scalable enterprise software applications REMEDY ANALYTICS is a consultancy that provides significant and quantifiable savings to the payers of Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) services. The company is the culmination of two prior companies within the prescription benefits industry that came together with the goal of educating clients about pharmacy benefit industry practices while providing significant, data driven cost savings for their services. The vision was to combine advanced analytics and industry expertise to provide clients with prescription benefits savings, contract replacement innovations and predictive modelling algorithms. Recognizing that diverse intellectual capital is a key ingredient to success, Remedy Analytics boasts highly experienced professionals with a collective 100+ years of expertise across the healthcare, pharmacy benefits, and employee benefits fields. However, while Remedy Analytics was rich in healthcare and benefits expertise, the start up was searching for a powerful and proprietary analytics technology that could serve as the foundation of its business within a short period of time. Assessing their options to build this technology and get to market quickly Remedy Analytics found that: Offshoring the project would require a substantially large investment in personnel and force the team to work at a distance from their development partner. They needed an established, technically mature partner that could collaborate with their experts to extract, understand and develop their requirements, advise on technology and reduce the overall risk of the endeavour. Initial development would have to focus on the core architecture, an unpredictably lengthy and risky project before business logic could be applied. Remedy Analytics wanted a trusted partner that they were confident understood the goals of their new business and had the technology to build a quality solution quickly. Engaging in a lengthy, costly and unpredictable development project was not an option.
Remedy Analytics Meets TwoFour The partners of TwoFour have worked together for 25 years and have an established track record of delivering technology and consulting solutions across the financial services sector. Focused on providing transaction processing solutions for foreign exchange and cash management, TwoFour s software provides banks and other financial services firms with workflow based real time data management on a global scale. While these software applications are relevant to the financial services industry, they are all built atop the same core architecture called TwoFour Foundation. When Scott Martin, CEO of Remedy Analytics and Steve Davis, CEO of TwoFour started talking about Remedy Analytics goals, a plan began to take shape for an approach to technology. Starting with a clean slate in terms of Remedy Analytics infrastructure, TwoFour Foundation offered a solution that could get Remedy Analytics to market quickly while minimizing development risk issues. Additionally, leveraging TwoFour s professional services would provide technical expertise while helping to avoid up front human resource costs. Remedy Analytics was confident that the combination of TwoFour Foundation and TwoFour s technical and development expertise was the solution to take their business forward. TwoFour would be able to handle the diverse requirements for the new system and TwoFour Foundation provided a quality, battlehardened core architecture to build Remedy Analytics proprietary business logic upon. The Plan: TwoFour Foundation & TwoFour Consulting TwoFour s software solutions are designed to address today s business needs using the latest industry adopted technology. TwoFour s solutions are built in C# on the Window s.net framework supporting MS SQL Server. Leveraging the same design principles that characterize quality enterprise software applications, TwoFour Foundation offers a robust.net and C# based core systems architecture to facilitate and jump start the development of business transaction processing systems across any industry. TwoFour Foundation enables startup development projects, such as Remedy Analytics, to leverage proven system components that are at the heart of mature enterprise software applications while also providing the ongoing support of its consulting services. For clients that have internal IT and other resources, the jump start allows their developers to leverage the system architecture components and focus on building the functionality that is essential and unique to their specific business. The core architecture includes a robust security and user authentication component, a rules based workflow engine, an automated process scheduler, a real time publisher, a modern user interface, an integrated client web portal, Architecture Solution Design Principles: Global / Distributed High Availability / Fault Tolerance Scalable High performance Workflow driven Real time system status Real time business data 24 X 7 User friendly Rich in functionality Secure Built in analysis/monitoring tools Robust reporting, open database model Component based Evolves with technology a user configurable interface gateway for systems communications, a userconfigurable data reporting tool, transaction auditability features, and extensive data access features.
Additionally, the system supports high frequency, high volume transactions and a multitude of system monitoring and deployment features. Industry standard practices along with project templates can further accelerate the development process. Remedy Analytics opted to leverage TwoFour s consulting services to assist them with project planning, requirements analysis, business logic development, testing, and hardware procurement and hosting. In addition to expertise with TwoFour Foundation, these services provided Remedy Analytics a structured development approach with a collaborative partner capable of working with them to mature their requirements. Rather than take a requirements document and start development blindly, TwoFour approached the project in an agile fashion and partnered with Remedy Analytics to think through requirements and to brainstorm any potential pitfalls in the design or development of the system. The Solution: Building Remedy s Proprietary Business Logic atop TwoFour Foundation Along with Remedy Analytics healthcare experts, TwoFour s consultants also developed and configured the components of the Pharmalogic engine. This included developing business logic, custom screens, communications to the servers, database schema and leveraging the configurable interface gateway. Pharmalogic Engine Built atop TwoFour
Pharmalogic allows Remedy Analytics to import a wide range of Benefit Manager files, drug and provider related information based on customized parameters. Millions of rows of transactional data are interfaced into the application, which the user can easily navigate through by adding specific search criteria. The solution then runs a wide ranging analysis across millions of transactions to audit financial, contractual guarantees and to analyze the performance of prescription drug claim pricing. The results of the analysis engine are then displayed via comprehensive reports. These results allow Remedy Analytics to provide in depth recommendations and deliver valuable cost savings to clients. Project Results Remedy Analytics will be leveraging TwoFour s Managed Services Implementation Model, which allows the flexibility to host and retain control of the physical infrastructure associated with TwoFour s solutions while leaving operating environment setup and daily operations and maintenance to TwoFour s Support personnel. This model allows Remedy Analytics to focus resources and expertise on functions unique to their business operations while leveraging the deep domain and systems expertise of TwoFour s staff beyond the initial implementation of TwoFour s solutions. By choosing Foundation, Remedy Analytics was able to avoid spending time and money focusing on the underlying technology platform and focus energy on their business. Not only was the duration of development time accelerated and impressive, but the considerable cost effectiveness and savings could not have been achieved by building from scratch. Leveraging Foundation also provided Remedy Analytics the added assurance that their solution would be grounded on proven, mature components. Remedy Analytics & TwoFour: A Formula for Success Remedy Analytics unique combination of advanced analytics and industry expertise makes it well positioned to bring significant and quantifiable cost savings to the payers of PBM services throughout the United States. Remedy Analytics CEO Scott Martin stated: The goal of Remedy Analytics is to provide our clients with the pharmacy benefit knowledge and tools necessary to effectively manage their prescription benefit program. That requires a unique technology and we now have the platform that will allow us to accomplish what we once believed to be beyond reach in the healthcare industry. From the start, TwoFour Foundation provided Remedy Analytics with: Battle-hardened core functionality Reduced development risk Reduced cost for quality Evolving technology with support Continued feature investment Operational solution with technical control Documentation Easy access to expertise
Remedy Analytics realized its objectives and is thrilled by how quickly TwoFour Foundation allowed us to jump start the project we got to market with a stable, quality solution in a fraction of the time that would have been needed if we had started from scratch somewhere else. TwoFour s on going business and technical expertise enables Remedy Analytics and its investors to benefit from a very high level of performance and reliability at a fraction of the cost normally required to obtain it. Remedy Analytics cites TwoFour s top level support and quality of resources as unique differentiators from other providers. By choosing TwoFour Foundation, Remedy Analytics was able minimize developmental risk, lower costs, better utilize internal resources and get to market faster with a proven, rock solid technology. And TwoFour deems Remedy Analytics to be an ideal customer in that they have a clear idea of what they want and know how to identify exactly what they need in terms of functional specifications. Foundation truly introduces TwoFour to a broad new range of clients. While each customer development project has unique characteristics and value add customizations, TwoFour Foundation allows them to leverage a battle hardened and proven development technology that can literally cut their time to market in half, said TwoFour CEO Steve Davis. Combined with the TwoFour Professional Services team or our clients own developers, TwoFour Foundation reduces development time, risk, cost, and complexity, and we are thrilled to bring these business benefits to a company like Remedy Analytics. Steve Davis, CEO, TwoFour Remedy Analytics and TwoFour continue to work together to support and enhance Remedy Analytics technology within the healthcare sector. ABOUT TWOFOUR TwoFour is a software solutions provider and consultancy focused on helping clients reduce costs, improve and reengineer systems and process flows. For more information please visit our website.