Waseel improves healthcare processing by 20X on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The healthcare IT provider moves to Oracle Autonomous Database on OCI, boosting security and data access for healthcare and insurance organizations.
“If you go to a hospital or a clinic in Saudi Arabia and the Waseel system is down, the whole operation might come to a halt. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database, we not only achieved high availability and performance, but also data security and integrity that we require as the leading healthcare technology in Saudi Arabia.”
Business challenges
Since Waseel entered the medical insurance sector in Saudi Arabia as an enabler for the country’s healthcare digital transformation efforts, the company has been on a continuous upward trajectory. Established in 2003, Waseel is the market leader for health insurance e-transactions in Saudi Arabia, supporting more than 95% of the country’s healthcare providers and 17 health insurance companies with a B2B platform that handles eligibility, pre-authorizations, and claims.
The process of managing and handling personally identifiable information is crucial to the healthcare industry because of the sensitivity of patient data and medical records. Hence, Waseel needed to ensure the accuracy, security, and confidentiality of patient data, medical records, and client information, as well as provide superior performance.
One of the things I like about Oracle is the cost transparency. With Oracle Autonomous Database, we enjoy automatic adjustments of the resources we consume, we monitor in real time how costs drop, and we see an impressive query performance.
Why Waseel chose Oracle
After reviewing cloud providers, Waseel decided to move production to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Autonomous Database. The main factors in the decision were the economical total cost of ownership, elimination of maintenance efforts, ease of scalability, and high performance.
Originally, Waseel’s platform relied on on-premises hardware and software. However, for strategic reasons, the company decided to move into the cloud. In a first step, the company moved to OCI and Oracle Database as a Service. Using OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE), the company now is using modern cloud native development to transform its own application into a microservices platform.
Results
Waseel moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using the Oracle Cloud data center in Jeddah, ensuring that it could satisfy growing demand, help clients reduce claim costs, improve revenue management, and prevent fraud.
The built-in and always-on security of OCI provided Waseel with the required high level of data security, controlling access to sensitive medical and patient information in the client’s environment using OCI’s Web Application Firewall. Hosting its databases in the Oracle Cloud region in Jeddah, Waseel satisfied data residency requirements that stipulate that sensitive data must be stored within Saudi Arabia.
In a second move, Waseel deployed Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database, reducing the response time for large queries from one minute to five seconds. The high performance with self-tuning ensures that all healthcare providers in the country can process claims and issue payments over Waseel’s B2B platform.
In addition, total cost of ownership dropped by 40% from the self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities of Oracle Autonomous Database. The substantially lowered workload of Waseel’s database administrators enabled the company to move several DBAs from administrative to value-added tasks.
Furthermore, efficiency is key for Waseel. With changing workloads throughout the year, Waseel could scale up or scale down at any time according to its business needs, generating additional savings.
Partners
Waseel worked with Oracle Cloud Lift Services for expert guidance and resources. The smooth implementation without any business interruptions was the result of rigorous planning and testing.
About the customer
Waseel is the premier regional healthcare transactions company in Saudi Arabia. It is helping to transform the healthcare industry by integrating with the National Platform for Healthcare Information Exchange Services (NPHIES) along with being a market leader in the Revenue Cycle Management and the Pharmacy Benefit Management industries.