• Healthcare

Delivering Transparency and Savings to the Prescription Drug Market

JBS Dev migrated Scripta Insights' Script.AI to AWS Lambda, S3 and RDS, and upgraded the app to Python 3.

AT A GLANCE

The Project at a Glance

  • The Challenge

    Scripta Insights ran its startup platform on Amazon EC2 with local file storage, local databases, and Python 2, which had hit end of life. It needed to scale to customers with many health plans.

  • What We Built

    JBS Dev moved the app from EC2 to AWS Lambda, file storage to Amazon S3, and databases to Amazon RDS. The team also upgraded the code to Python 3 and built a health plan engine.

  • The Result

    Scripta now computes drug savings for individual health plans and generates reports on a regular basis. It pays only for the compute time it uses and manages drug information across all customers.

BACKGROUND

An IT Healthcare Solution Upgrades Its Vital Technology in a Push to Further Level the Pharmaceutical Benefits Playing Field

Scripta Insights, headquartered in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a dynamic healthcare tech company currently engaged in disrupting the $300B pharmacy benefits industry with its proprietary software as a service (SaaS) technology. This technology, Script.AI, has undergone iterative development for several years in a remarkable quest to create transparency and significantly improve the self-funded pharmacy benefits marketplace.

The company’s founder, Dr. Paul S. Bradley, was frustrated by the astronomical cost of prescription drugs and the negative impact it frequently had on his patients with high deductible health plans. Many of these patients were not taking the drugs they desperately needed because they could not afford them.

Joining forces with his wife, Mindy Bradley, a financial auditor and Certified Public Accountant (CPA), they formed Scripta Insights to bring robust technology to the root cause of this problem—a complex and layered prescription drug marketplace in which the true prices of important drugs are extremely obfuscated by a lopsided market that changes on a daily basis and requires deep expertise to understand.

To challenge the status quo—along with the entrenched suppliers dictating market prices—Scripta leveraged technology to solve the “big data” problem of pharmacy benefits using advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Tools were developed to allow payers to analyze each and every pharmacy transaction for actionable insights, strategies, and clear-cut opportunities to save money. Through this transforming technology, Scripta has been able to identify a 46% savings opportunity for payers.

However, to successfully continue using this technology as the “great leveler” in the complex pharmaceutical benefits field, Scripta soon found, like most high-growth organizations, that it needed to evolve by making significant upgrades to its technology, infrastructure, and application. These improvements were critical to further optimize the unprecedented control it had already provided payers over their pharmacy benefits spend.

THE PROBLEM

Challenges

With Scripta growing over the years, its start-up technology needed to be rapidly upgraded to catch-up with some of the new challenges presented by its customers in a quickly evolving marketplace. These challenges largely related to scaling its business systems, providing more customer targeted features, and improving customer analytics.

More specifically, Scripta needed to build a core business platform that could easily scale to support customers with an array of different health plans that were always evolving. Moreover, it needed to “push out” even more actionable and valuable information to its customers in the form of targeted savings reports provided on a regular basis.

These reports—the lifeblood of the business model—recommended alternative medications that could provide payers substantial savings along with pharmacy benefit cost containment. Through these upgrades to its solution, Scripta would further mature its disruptive industry technology allowing it to support more customers, sell enhanced services, and provide more control over different health plan configurations.

Being a very unique company, Scripta needed an exceptional technology partner that could help take them to the next level while having an almost innate understanding of their core business model and tech needs. This included making sure that their solution continued to remain fully secure and compliant with the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). They readily found this in JBS Dev.

THE SOLUTION

How JBS Dev Helped

Starting in 2019, JBS Dev worked with Scripta’s team to upgrade its vital technology to achieve the new business requirements for the system. The project lead, Ryan Dale, a Director of Delivery at JBS Dev, said “We strategized a cloud migration plan for taking Scripta’s technology to the next level. This included upgrading the architecture, file storage, database, and programming language.”

The architecture was upgraded from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda-based architecture. AWS Lambda provided a serverless compute service for running code on Scripta’s app. This upgrade maintained all Scripta legacy functionality while allowing for large changes to be made to the computational logic of the application as needed to support the business model.

Additionally, JBS Dev migrated the Scripta app to AWS Lambda and developed a health plan engine that fully incorporated specific plan data into savings calculations. This migration to AWS Lambda also allowed Scripta to pay for only the service time that was being used instead of paying all the time.

JBS Dev also migrated Scripta’s local file storage to the cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). S3, which is specifically designed for file and object storage, provided enhanced space for Scripta’s eligibility and claim files, among other things. This migration provided Scripta with the typical benefits of storing objects in the cloud such as scalability, ease of access, protection from loss of data, and granular control over security.

In addition to files, JBS Dev migrated all of Scripta’s local databases to Amazon Remote Data Service (RDS). Originally, all Scripta databases were housed in the EC2 instance. By moving to RDS, Scripta databases would have much more scalability and resiliency. The data would be able to auto-scale and not easily be obliterated, corrupted, or deleted as it might with just a local backup.

Lastly, Python 2, the programming language used by Scripta for its app had hit end of life. It was no longer being supported or getting security updates—making it extremely vulnerable to use for any further development. Accordingly, JBS Dev migrated Scripta over to Python 3 which was fully supported.

THE OUTCOME

Results

Once the cloud migration plan for upgrading Scripta’s vital technology had been completely implemented by JBS Dev, the company found itself in a more solid position to further unleash its disruptive technology across the pharmaceutical benefits playing field. With everything in place, Scripta now has new code to compute drug savings for individual health plans and is able to generate more actionable reports on a regular basis providing enhanced value and savings for its customers. They also have an increased ability to manage drug information across all customers going forward.

Looking down the road, Scripta is excited to continue working with JBS Dev to further develop its unique product and niche. Specifically, Scripta wishes to make it as easy as possible for its product teams to use technology to update data. The goal is to make the application as “self-servicing” as possible while giving it even more control over health plans, drug information, and associated costs.

At its core, the whole technology process is about continuously maturing the product to fully support and service the full range of customer requirements and needs. To make this happen, JBS Dev provided Scripta with added value by fully upgrading their architecture, file storage, databases, and programming language. Consequently, Scripta is now in a more competitive position to provide enhanced services to its customers so they can take even further control over their pharmacy benefits spend.

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