Munich Re HealthTech gives global customers data insights and control using OCI

Munich Re HealthTech (MRHT) was established in 1995 to provide innovative solutions for health insurance companies and third-party administrators. Actuaries use high volumes of data from many sources to assess the financial strategies used by insurance companies. For example, the process used by some actuaries to gather data to assess financial reserves was effective yet laborious, taking 10 to 15 days nearly every month to make their calculations/reserve settings. MRHT’s SMAART application helped insurers dramatically reduce this time to a few hours. The all-in-one SMAART (Sophisticated Monitoring and Assessment of Risk Tool) supports underwriting, product pricing, claims handling, finance, and risk management.

But as demand grew for SMAART across multiple countries, the Munich Re HealthTech team needed to meet customers’ data residency requirements mandated by their regulators. Insurers also were asking for new ways to analyze the rapidly growing data volumes and sources to draw out business insights. The team began searching for ways to develop new reporting functionality faster and to take advantage of automation and artificial intelligence for more advanced analytics.

The company needed to move SMAART to a cloud-based infrastructure that could better support its security, compliance, scalability, and analytical needs.

As a longtime Oracle Database customer, the company decided to migrate its SMAART application to Oracle Enterprise Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to take advantage of low-latency data access and top performance. The company recognized that the cloud database service would also provide more flexibility to scale capacity up or down based on demand.

Munich Re HealthTech evaluated several other vendors, but their approach required building a globally distributed database, which would have taken years to migrate the data model and modify the code. Migrating the Oracle Database to OCI would require no code modifications and deliver valuable built-in database options that would help improve data security and reporting.

Oracle APEX and Oracle Database decreased the time needed to build analytical dashboards, while also helping to reduce human error and security risks.

Moving SMAART to OCI achieved numerous Munich Re HealthTech goals. Sharding in the Oracle Database helped Munich Re HealthTech meet important data residency requirements for customers. It gave customers the ability to store segments of data in the OCI Cloud Region in the country of their choice, helping them improve data access and control by allowing a single logical database to be distributed over multiple geographies while keeping the application in one region. The data proximity also reduced global data replication by eliminating the process of copying large amounts of data from a central warehouse as distributed parallel queries; this resulted in faster reporting and analytics. In addition, Oracle Sharding helped to lower data security risk by restricting user access to specific, authorized areas.

Oracle APEX, a low-code application development framework, helped the company quickly create an automated means to extract data from spreadsheets, reducing the time to prepare the required analytical dashboards to monitor and steer the insurance portfolio in SMAART from days to few hours, while also reducing human error and ensuring the right security controls are in place. The company created the whole process and built all the necessary dashboards within months using Oracle APEX, without the need for additional software licenses, on time and on budget.

Munich Re HealthTech data professionals also use machine learning for R in Oracle Cloud Database to apply AI models without exporting data, helping them manage advanced analysis with greater simplicity, security, and performance.

Munich Re HealthTech selected Oracle partner and APEX expert Pretius to assist with the project. Pretius provided guidance on the ongoing management of APEX applications. The project went live in four months.