The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is shifting their technology ecosystem away from older, traditional data centers to the cloud. Teams using CMS Cloud are able to react and quickly pivot technology for the unexpected—such as a three-fold increase in enrollments in Healthcare.gov from last year. By automating and standardizing the way CMS onboards application teams, Nava helped reduce the onboarding time from months to hours.
Since 2018, Nava has been working alongside CMS to shift their technology ecosystem away from older, traditional data centers, to the cloud. While hundreds of applications already run on CMS Cloud, the agency continues to migrate more applications, services, and other workloads to the cloud platform. This transition offers CMS application teams compliant, adaptable, cost effective, and highly secure ways of managing applications and data.
While traditional data centers are limited in their capacity for responsive change, teams using CMS Cloud are able to react and quickly pivot technology for the unexpected—such as supporting a pandemic-related policy changes and a Special Enrollment Period for HealthCare.gov that enrolled 2.1 million people in 2021, a three-fold increase over the same period the year before.
CMS Cloud offers customer support services to assist application teams working in the cloud. The platform also bakes in best practices for cost management, security and compliance, DevSecOps, DevOps, and disaster recovery to keep CMS technology resilient in the event of system failures. The ongoing shift to cloud builds a strong foundation that allows CMS to rapidly evolve and adapt, ultimately helping CMS become more responsive to the needs of beneficiaries and providers in a rapidly changing world.
Before, onboarding application teams into the cloud was an effective but highly manual process for the CMS Cloud team and the application teams themselves. Working collaboratively with CMS and a number of vendors and contractors, Nava’s team helped to standardize and ultimately automate these processes, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes for their cloud accounts to be created from months to hours.
Collaborating across teams to automate the onboarding process
Alongside the CMS Cloud team, Nava helped design and implement an automated process for the creation and closure of individual support ticket requests when an application team starts the onboarding process. Creating this workflow involves collaborating with teams across the entire cloud platform to identify the most efficient ways to route requests. We helped build this system accounting for how much this environment continually changes, creating a strong foundation as these processes evolve.
From there, we worked alongside CMS to remove repetitive manual work. This improved the developer experience for application teams onboarding and allowing them to get on and use cloud technology faster.
Nava and the CMS Cloud team applied the same processes when helping to automate CMS’s development and infrastructure management (DevOps) tools. DevOps tools are necessary to keep technology systems running smoothly—an application upgrade or security upgrades, for example, are crucial processes that require ongoing maintenance. Automating these processes eases adoption and makes it easier for teams to utilize tools that will enable them to be agile and securely and effectively operate their applications. For a massive organization like CMS, with engineers spread across hundreds of teams, that adds up to a significant reduction in processing time.
By providing a modern cloud platform, CMS creates opportunities for more nimble teams that are able to compete for government work and produce better outcomes. Easing these early stage processes is foundational to building a CMS technology ecosystem set up to handle a rapidly changing world with increasingly complex needs. These repeatable, sustainable processes are core to building a strong future for CMS’s millions of beneficiaries and working alongside CMS to transform healthcare across the nation.
