DataData Integration Case Studies

CASE STUDY: CobaltRx lowers costs and improves client services

“Our clients need clarity of cost and trend drivers for their pharmacy benefit plan. Unfortunately, the vast amounts of data that is produced by their vendors makes this difficult. K3 offered us a more manageable and cost-effective way to easily assimilate myriad data files, so our Tableau data visualization tools can assist us in providing clients with the most accurate insights.”
Ginger Campbell – President, CobaltRx

 

The Business

CobaltRx is a consulting and auditing company for large pharmacy benefit plan sponsors and nationally recognized in the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) sector for their analytics centric culture. Their consultants collect, organize, and analyze client data for insights that help optimize expenditures on clients’ pharmacy benefit plans. Customers use their data to manage plan costs, measure performance, predict future costs, and identify opportunities for benefit redesign. CobaltRx also serves as back-office support for other pharmacy benefit consultants, providing them with data analytics and auditing services to meet clients’ needs.

The Growth Challenge

As their business grew, CobaltRx quickly needed to move beyond manual processes and data that was poorly formatted, difficult to parse, and inconsistent. The business managed this with short-term contractor support to solve data problems that, unfortunately, began to crop up on a daily basis.

With an existing tech stack that used Informatica to normalize client data files and Salesforce to store that data and build custom reports, pharmacy benefit consultants were dependent on technical staff to effectively help them service customers. New files? Technical request. Change to existing files. Technical request.

CobaltRx needed simplicity and consistency in its data unification and data transformation processes.

The Simple Solution

Upon an initial assessment, BroadPeak discovered CobaltRx was not utilizing the capacity of their tech stack and, frankly, were buried in complexity they didn’t need. They were using Salesforce as a simple database and Informatica for fundamental data mapping, while spending unnecessary dollars along the way.

Our solution was streamlined and frictionless. K3 replaced their stack and added a Microsoft SQL Server database for data storage and Tableau for reporting. K3 delivered an easy to maintain ETL process as well as a data repository with clean data, and Tableau empowered them to slice and dice information as needed.

CobaltRx consultants could now incorporate new files and handle changes to existing client files themselves. Additionally, as ongoing analysis revealed revisions that should be made upstream, consultants can make those directly in K3 – no technical middleman necessary.

Lower Costs and Improved Client Service

Not only was CobaltRx able to rid themselves of unnecessary software expenses, they also shed their reliance on external technical contractors to drive a core part of their business. This grew the margins on their business giving them a competitive edge on pricing while bidding for new deals. With data-powered consultants and shorter process times, their already diligent client service also experienced a boost.

Today

The new technical stack has served as a foundation for company growth, all the while providing company principals with increased control and awareness over their clients’ data. Rather than focus on the data plumbing, time and resources are focused on CobaltRx’s core mission: uncovering insights to help their clients’ bottom lines.