Medibank: Transforming the Customer Experience with Centralised Big Data Platform

About the Client

Medibank is an integrated healthcare company providing private health insurance and health solutions to 3.7 million Australians. The company is implementing a next-generation data platform to drive a deeper level of customer interaction and increased customer care across their insurance and health support services.

The Challenge

Medibank was being held back with a fragmented and siloed view of key customer-related data. As a result, opportunities were missed to align appropriate products and services to suit new and existing customers’ needs, address potential fraudulent customer activity, centralise marketing approaches and reduce costs of customer service and marketing.

Medibank required a complete uplift of their processes and tools, including:

• Architectural design of a next-generation data platform in AWS
• Design and delivery of CI/CD tooling to effectively deploy the data platform
• Design and delivery of a security and governance control framework
• Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) monitoring, logging and alerting
• Support of the ETL transformations

Contino was selected as the Primary Delivery Partner to help augment Medibank’s data capabilities with a focus on client, cost optimisation, and continuous improvement and innovation.

The Solution

Contino and Medibank formed a close partnership, building a joint, cross-functional team to deliver the centralised data platform. Contino brought expertise from across a range of areas such as data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), big data processing and data storage to both build the platform and upskill Medibank’s teams in modern data practices in the process.

This cross-functional team was critical in enabling Medibank to build, drive and deliver the data platform through the automation of cloud hosting, testing and code deployments. The data platform was built using a variety of services including Airflow for ETL, S3 buckets for organised data storage, Redshift and EMR for analysis, as well as CI/CD tooling for automated deployments.

Contino completed the project and handed over to Medibank’s operations teams to deliver on work requests ranging from simple one-off extracts to complex projects. The solution provides for self-service business insights and reporting functionality to other business units such as Commercial, Finance and Actuarial.

During this project Contino was successful in delivering:

• AWS Landing Zone Infrastructure—including multiple direct connects to the current Medibank systems allowing seamless use of services.
• Airflow cluster to allow automated ingestion and ETL of incoming data
• A fully automated CI/CD pipeline based on Jenkins that allowed:
  • Airflow DAG deployment including Linting and Testing
  • Packer Image creation for servers such as Airflow and Jenkins itself
  • Terraform deployments including:
  • Rolling out all infrastructure from Landing zone to Servers
  • Setting up services such as AWS Glue / Redshift
  • On-demand custom EMR clusters and data sources
• Automatic systems and application log shipment to Sumologic
  

The Business Outcome

The deployment of the Medibank MARS platform has enabled a number of key business outcomes to be realised.

• The MARS platform provides a centralised environment that allows internal Medibank business units to easily analyse and access data, removing the siloed and fragmented data that existed previously.
• Business units within Medibank can more effectively analyse large volumes of data, while being able to better model customer profiles that ultimately drive highly-targeted marketing campaigns for Medibank customers across their products and services.
• Medibank sees in-home care as an important offering to our members, with services ranging from chemotherapy, palliative care to kidney disease and dialysis. The key business outcome of this initiative is to not only ensure their customers receive the best possible care, but to also enhance the customer experience across the Medibank product and service portfolio. Medibank aims to match their customers’ medical profiles from one data source and propose solutions such as in-home care through the MARS platform.
• The MARS platform will provide Medibank with a point of differentiation on how they offer customised health plans to customers and will enable marketing campaigns that provide tailored solutions to customers.