CareSource delivers reliable healthcare and achieves million-dollar savings with Dynatrace

CareSource is dedicated to making a difference in its members’ lives by improving their health and well-being. To advance that mission, the company is focused on driving innovation to transform the healthcare industry and redefine experiences for members and providers. As a not-for-profit organization, operational excellence is also vital, because CareSource needs to direct all investments into driving value for members. Technology is key to achieving both objectives, enabling CareSource to reinvent care models so members can access a doctor or the medicines they need more easily, while streamlining delivery processes for providers.

The critical nature of healthcare means that as the industry becomes more digital, CareSource needs to ensure its services are reliable and available whenever its members need them. To meet that need, CareSource wanted to create a proactive culture for service management, where application engineering teams can identify and resolve potential problems before they impact members and providers. It therefore decided to adopt a new, more advanced and intuitive observability platform, to increase adoption amongst its engineering team and accelerate time to insights.

After evaluating several solutions, CareSource identified Dynatrace as the clear winner due to its automated and user-friendly approach. Because Dynatrace detects entity relationships with no manual configuration, engineering teams began surfacing insights within minutes rather than hours, with minimal effort. CareSource migrated to the platform in just three weeks, and within 60 days had instrumented more than 600 applications. This drove adoption of observability insights up by 450% across the workforce compared to its previous solution. Dynatrace’s partnership with Microsoft also created advantages for CareSource, qualifying them for the Microsoft Azure Migrate and Modernize Program and resulting in greater cost savings.

“We have trusted partners with Dynatrace and Microsoft. We migrated from our on-premises monitoring solution to the cloud in 30 days—with zero disruption and at zero cost,” said Garret Bauer, Director of Application Engineering at CareSource. “Innovation drives our growth. But to do that, we need to make sure our services are reliable and resilient. Dynatrace is the core of this effort —it's the nucleus that gives us clear, actionable insights into our workloads running on Azure. This allows us to shift time and energy away from firefighting, allowing our engineers to focus on delivering better solutions to our members.”

• More reliable care: After adopting Dynatrace, CareSource created a tiger team of cross-functional specialists to resolve an elusive problem that had been impacting the reliability of its prior authorization processes. These processes enable care providers to validate whether members have access to the care they are requesting, so it’s essential they work perfectly. Dynatrace enabled the team to identify the cause and work with CareSource’s technology partners to remediate it quickly, which has now increased service uptime to 99%.

• Faster resolutions: CareSource’s network operations center (NOC) team used Dynatrace’s integration with ServiceNow to automatically create incident tickets and route them to the relevant team along with actionable insights that help to remediate the problem. This has driven mean time to resolution (MTTR) down dramatically and put CareSource on track with its goal to reduce it by 30% in 2025. Now, the NOC team is looking to integrate Dynatrace with Ansible to drive self-healing workflows that automatically resolve issues.

• Optimized operations: CareSource has reduced the number of observability solutions it uses from three down to one, which has led to lower licensing and maintenance costs, setting it on course to save nearly $1 million over three years. As an added benefit, engineers can now find solutions to problems much faster with Dynatrace, which frees up more of their time for innovation and finding new ways to improve care experiences for members and providers.

• Unified insights: With Dynatrace’s Grail technology, CareSource has been able to bring logs and distributed traces together in a single platform to enable deeper, more context-rich analytics. This reduces the costs of maintaining multiple monitoring solutions and creates a single pane of glass where CareSource’s engineers can collaborate with internal and external stakeholders. As a result, they can identify user frustrations faster and make better, more data-driven decisions about where improvements can be made.

“Dynatrace is helping us build reliability into our services. We can identify overutilized systems and pinpoint where our main issues occur so we can address them effectively,” said Bauer. “The proactive awareness in our NOC has reduced our MTTR and delivered stability to our members and our business. Dynatrace also provides us the ability to look at business analytics and real user monitoring. Seeing what our members experience as they navigate our websites allows us to focus our time and energy on resolving and improving those issues for a better future.”