HM Health Solutions

Company Overview
HM Health Solutions (HMHS) delivers business solutions to health plan payers so they can run their organizations efficiently in a competitive and ever-changing market. By offering cutting-edge technology and unparalleled industry knowledge, HMHS meets the many operational needs of health plan payers. HMHS is partnered with 13 health plans serving 10 million members.
Challenge
In the United States, health plans and providers face tough challenges. The combination of an aging population and a constantly changing regulatory environment means that cost-effective delivery is more important than ever. And even though margins are tightening, delivering high-quality care experiences is essential to drive membership growth and encourage long-term member retention.
HM Health Solutions recognized that a new generation of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities could empower its healthcare affiliates to harness their data to solve these challenges.
To support informatics and data science teams across its affiliate network, HM Health Solutions decided to build a cutting-edge data lake, based on a Hortonworks Data Platform Hadoop cluster. The aim was to create a one-stop shop for analytics workloads, with the scalability to accommodate growing data volumes in the long-term.
Because the new Hadoop cluster was intended to become a critical data platform, HM Health Solutions needed a way to deliver round-the-clock availability with full protection for Hadoop Distributed File System [HDFS] and Apache Hive data. The question was how to most efficiently replicate its data to a secondary DR site.
Solution
To achieve its DR and high-availability goals, HM Health Solutions selected WANdisco technology to continuously replicate HDFS and Hive data between both sites. By configuring WANdisco's solution for bidirectional replication, HM Health Solutions’ DR environment could be used for production workloads, effectively doubling its compute capacity without compromising on its DR capabilities.
![]()
“One of the things that impressed us most about WANdisco's technology was its ability to resolve the data consistency challenges of replicating large amounts of data between active Hadoop clusters. Because WANdisco's solution enforces consistency between each environment automatically, there’s no need for manual intervention from our team—enabling us to focus on value-added development work.”
Steven Swartzlander, Lead Architect at HM Health Solutions
Results
- Enables seamless business continuity in the event of an outage, reducing operational disruption.
- Ensures near-zero data loss in a recovery scenario, keeping valuable healthcare data protected.
- Offers a scalable solution able to handle predicted 30% year-on-year increase in data volumes.
