Navicure, Inc. Speeds Development of Web-Based Healthcare Payment Solutions With VMware vCloud Suite

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced that Navicure, Inc., a leading healthcare payment solutions provider for hospitals, physician practices and billing companies, is achieving faster product development times by reducing the time required to provision test and development environments from days to minutes with the VMware vCloud® Suite.

The VMware vCloud Suite enables organizations to build, operate and manage a private cloud based on a software-defined data center architecture; policy-based, self-service provisioning; disaster recovery; and operations management in a single solution.

“A key driver for using the VMware vCloud Suite is the ability to automate the delivery and reclamation of development environments,” said Donald Wilkins, IT Director, Navicure, Inc. “As a result, we can now offer our developers a self-service catalog to deploy development and test environments on-demand -- removing IT as a bottleneck. The streamlined development process enables Navicure to bring new and enhanced applications and functionality to our growing customer base faster.” 

VMware vCloud Suite Provides IT Efficiency and Financial Transparency
Headquartered in Duluth, Ga., Navicure’s healthcare payment solutions help provider organizations increase revenue, accelerate cash flow, and reduce cost from managing insurance claims and patient payments. Its solutions automate account receivables processes, including primary and secondary claims reimbursement; patient eligibility verification; rejected and denied claims management, including appeals; electronic remittance and posting; claims and remittance reporting and analysis; and patient statement and payment processing. Navicure delivers its award-winning solutions to over 50,000 healthcare providers nationwide in a Software-as-a-Service model and is growing at a rate of over 20 percent annually while currently processing over 1.5 million transactions daily.

With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) taking effect in 2014, the company plans to refresh existing applications and introduce new solutions to help guide its customers through the transition. With limited staff and resources, Navicure IT sought to automate the governance and provisioning of IT services to eliminate manual, time-consuming management and authorization processes; while helping to deliver product enhancements and new solutions to market faster. In support of its agile development efforts, Navicure’s IT staff has empowered its developers to access development environments on-demand through a self-service portal. The portal provides developers with a variety of virtual machines to choose from including Web servers, application servers and databases to deliver a dev/test environment that is as close to production as possible.

Prior to using the VMware vCloud Suite, the typical turnaround time for provisioning development environments took days. With VMware’s automation solutions, Navicure IT took a two-phased approach to streamlining that process from days to two hours initially, and has now shortened provisioning to 15 minutes. 

In addition to deploying the self-service catalog, Navicure recently implemented the suite’s chargeback capabilities to gain insight into the consumption of resources including virtual machine and R&D costs. With chargeback, Navicure IT is now able to show the financial costs of building products and services back to the business. Wilkins added, “We wanted to provide finance a clear picture -- more than a gut feeling -- of how we’re using our infrastructure.”

Navicure also relies on the capacity planning capabilities of the VMware vCloud Suite to support its IT-related financial practices including its annual budgeting process. The company’s IT staff uses capacity planning for visibility into the use of compute, memory and storage resources, to accurately forecast future IT resource needs, and to optimize virtual machines for the most efficient use of resources.

Using the VMware vCloud Suite, Navicure virtualized business critical applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SQL Server as well as web servers and Java middleware servers for increased availability and ease of administration. To protect its applications, the company deployed the suite’s automated disaster recovery capabilities.

Additional Resources

1. View the Navicure video
2. Read more about the VMware vCloud Suite
3. Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware
VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2013 revenues of $5.21 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.