From Days To Hours: How Innovaccer Accelerated Deployment Efficiency

Background

Innovaccer is a leader in healthcare data integration, assisting payers, public health groups, and healthcare providers in filling in the data gaps to achieve better patient outcomes. Their platform integrates operational, clinical, and claims data to produce insights that may be used to improve population health, patient engagement, and care coordination.

To achieve this goal, a strong, scalable cloud infrastructure is required to support enormous volumes of private medical data, ensuring compliance with strict legal requirements such as HIPAA and HITRUST.

The infrastructure of Innovaccer runs on two different cloud platforms, AWS and Azure, and includes data stores for storage, Kubernetes for computation, and AI/ML algorithms for analytics. The difficulty for Innovaccer was overseeing a vast, individually tailored infrastructure for every customer.

While their strategy initially proved successful, its effectiveness diminished as the number of client environments expanded, leading to operational challenges. As a result, Innovaccer needed to find a more scalable solution to manage the increasing complexity.

Challenges

Managing hundreds of environments, each with unique configurations and tailored customer setups, created multiple operational bottlenecks. Initially, Innovaccer adopted Terraform and Terragrunt to handle infrastructure as code (IaC), but as the business scaled, so did the complexity:

• Script Bloat: The amount of Terraform scripts rose exponentially with the number of environments. Instead of concentrating on high-impact jobs, the platform developers at Innovaccer discovered that they were spending more time juggling scripts.
• Complex Governance: Ensuring that every environment complied with the necessary controls was no easy task, given the stringent requirements such as HIPAA, HITRUST, and other healthcare compliance standards. Compliance requirements frequently impeded the deployment process, posing a persistent challenge that needed to be addressed.
• Slow Speed to Market: Despite automation, deploying a new customer environment still took days. This lengthy process hampered Innovaccer’s ability to onboard new clients quickly and respond to fast-changing market needs.
• Multiple Cloud Management: Innovaccer’s decision to leverage both AWS and Azure to stay close to client data geographically added another layer of complexity. Managing separate Terraform branches for each cloud provider created syncing issues, adding further strain to their deployment process.

StackGen Solution

To address these inefficiencies, Innovaccer needed a solution that could streamline operations, enhance speed to market, and maintain strict governance, all without the need for additional manual work. That’s where StackGen came in.

It’s great to release something and get it out there, but that needs to be maintained. And that’s where our team has fallen short in the past when it comes to regular upgrade cycles and moving things through the pipeline.

— Bill Burton, VP Cloud Engineering

• Building Blocks for Consistency: StackGen’s visual designer provided Innovaccer with customizable, reusable building blocks for cloud environments. These blocks ensured that each deployment, whether in AWS or Azure, adhered to the same standardized and compliant configurations.
• Speed to Market: The real game-changer for Innovaccer was StackGen’s automation, which reduced deployment time from several days to less than a day. By automating the entire process, StackGen eliminated manual configurations, allowing Innovaccer to onboard new clients at lightning speed.
• Governance and Compliance Made Easy: With StackGen’s compliance tools, Innovaccer could easily select the right compliance controls for each environment, ensuring HIPAA, HITRUST, and public sector regulations were always met. This simplified the governance process, giving Innovaccer confidence that every deployment would meet the stringent standards.
• Multi-Cloud Agility: With deployments across AWS and Azure, Innovaccer no longer needed to manage separate Terraform branches manually. StackGen’s multi-cloud solution abstracted away the complexities of multi-cloud management, enabling seamless deployment across both clouds.

Results

• Speed to Market: Innovaccer accelerated environment deployment, going from a multi-day process to completing setups in under a day. This dramatic gain in velocity empowered the company to onboard more clients and scale operations faster than ever before.
• Team Efficiency: Innovaccer’s engineers reduced time spent on maintaining scripts and managing cloud environments. This boost in productivity allowed the team to focus on strategic initiatives and tackle more complex challenges, accelerating overall innovation.
• Improved Governance and Compliance: By automating healthcare compliance checks, Innovaccer reduced manual validation time from hours to just minutes — while cutting configuration errors. This not only ensured every deployment met strict regulatory standards but also provided peace of mind when handling sensitive patient data.
• Seamless Multi-Cloud Management: StackGen streamlined Innovaccer’s operations across AWS and Azure, reducing multi-cloud management time. Engineers could spend less time juggling platforms and more time engaging with customers and optimizing infrastructure to meet evolving needs.