Can Your Systems Handle Healthcare Open Enrollment Day Traffic?
Are you sure your systems are ready for the new and past enrollees, to create new accounts or update old insurance information. Last year Open Enrollment caused many outages for insurance providers the week of the enrollment deadlines, mostly due to surge traffic overwhelming their databases.
Are your websites, call centers and your computer systems up to the task should you experience sudden traffic surge?
You need to consider the transactions and the open page times people will be using while trying to figure out their new insurance needs. The call centers will have an extra load as well because there will be a lot of questions. My child is now oaver 26 what do I do? I had a new baby. I got married. All of these factors cause anguish for the people trying to set up their health insurance and that anguish gets transferred to your systems and people.
Prior to the enrollment day you may want to consider performing a full health check on your systems. You should consider checking:
- Security processes You want solid security, but you don’t want the security so expensive that transactions are slowed to a crawl
- Hardware Is there enough storage? What are the CPUs peaking at now during your current high it times?
- Application queries Are there any running slowly now?
- Locking and blocking Are you already interrupting transactions during reporting times or other large data queries that could slow down the response time for users signing on to buy your wares?
We Recommend a Health Check on Your Total Environment
We suggest that you consider completing a Health Check on your total environment, before you experience the next traffic surge. Consider checking security roles and security standards. Are they properly in place so that to the best of your ability you can lock any marauders out of your systems? If you do have an issue will you be able to nearly immediately roll up a second highly available fast-acting system so seamlessly that to your customers your products are always available for purchase?
Do you have the staff to maintain and watch your systems during this time that can react to any alerts before your systems all fail?
Are your servers and databases finely tuned, with proper indexing, data consistency checks and long running queries re-tuned to run fast and while providing the correct response? You should review your queries to examine which ones may cause issues when being hit by thousands of people per second. One second of response time can help make you hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.
Is your software up to date, with the latest security and bug patches? Is your software in compliance? You may want to consider updating your software before the big day.
Is your hardware up to the task? Do you have enough space available, can you expand for i/o if needed? Spending 10 – 100,000 on hardware now may help return millions in sales.
Customer service is very important for all businesses even health care businesses these days. Slow systems add to those costs and cause stress for your teams. Before your next busiest season, consider preparing with a Health Check
Soaring Eagle Consulting has an upcoming webinar series designed for companies preparing for these events such a Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Open Enrollment Days, Holiday Travel days, Check out our webinar page for more information.
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