14 reusable APIs
60 MuleSoft APIs
8% annual increase in API requests
Challenge
Meeting customer needs efficiently and at scale
SWICA is one of the leading health insurance providers in Switzerland and the highest rated for customer satisfaction. It covers conventional, complementary, and innovative medical treatments to give customers holistic healthcare services that suit their needs and preferences. It also offers employee cover for businesses.
To meet customer expectations efficiently and support company growth, SWICA is moving to a cloud infrastructure with better availability and scalability than its on-premises data center. This is part of a drive to reduce manual tasks for the IT team and free up staff to focus on developing digital services and distributing data. The on-premises data center was managed by a partner and had multiple points of integration, but the company lacked a cohesive data management strategy and visibility of its integrations. It needed a simple and efficient approach to connect backend systems and create a central source of company data.
Objectives
Building a centralized integration layer to share data easily across the company and beyond
SWICA is modernizing its integration platform to connect its broad system and application landscape. It plans to:
- Simplify sharing data with third parties, such as partners, medical practices, and customers.
- Improve logging and monitoring to ensure compliance and high availability.
- Secure all APIs in a robust and modern way.
Solution
Standardizing API management on one platform
SWICA chose MuleSoft as its integration platform in 2016, making it one of the earliest adopters in Switzerland. It offered an all-in-one solution from a well-known global brand. Since then, it’s become the strategic API platform and solution of choice for external applications, hyperscalers, and as-a-service offerings. Everything other than event-driven Microsoft applications – which are handled in Azure for simplicity – use MuleSoft APIs.
“It’s important to work with partners who understand the complexity of meeting compliance regulations in the health insurance sector,” said Fabian Andres, Team Lead, Integration Platforms and Solutions at SWICA. “MuleSoft is a trusted integration platform that reassures our regulators that we’re complying with Swiss data privacy and security laws.”
MuleSoft was implemented with support from codecentric, who trained the team of five dedicated developers how to run the platform in house. The team receives updated training a few times a year, and Andres is an active member of a Swiss community of MuleSoft champions known as APIForce. This community meets several times a year to share their knowledge and experiences of the platform.
Building reusable APIs to promote efficiency and reduce costs
The team uses Anypoint Design Center to design and build new APIs and integrate systems quickly, while the API Management Center dashboard provides central visibility of APIs and one place to manage and secure them. SWICA can also build APIs once and reuse them – for example, APIs connecting systems to employee data are reused up to eight times. Data is collected and merged from multiple systems, such as the CRM and payroll system. This unified data layer then underpins employee services, with multiple experiences built on top. The internal colleague directory takes information from this layer as well as employee applications and the B2B sales platform.
Orchestrating data across the business
MuleSoft manages system calls and facilitates data exchange between the CRM system, databases, file shares, the ERP system, and Syrius – the standard Swiss healthcare platform that handles policyholder information, contracts, and invoices.
“It’s notoriously difficult to facilitate data transfers between some of our systems, but MuleSoft APIs make it simple,” said Andres. “We can provide internal users and external partners with secure, easy-to-use APIs.”
This helps partners access SWICA data securely for governance purposes, while internal software developers can create apps and connect business platforms. For example, the customer-facing health insurance app connects to internal data sources and partner systems using MuleSoft APIs. Customers can log in to view their policies, and scan and upload paper invoices that are passed to Syrius for processing. Once complete, the invoice is routed to the right team to grant payment approval, and the customer receives payment for their treatment.
Results
Making insurance more streamlined and efficient
With MuleSoft, SWICA has connected the systems and data behind many of its critical day-to-day processes – from customers making a claim to employees collaborating with colleagues and clients. In the nine years since it implemented MuleSoft, SWICA hasn’t experienced a major outage. The platform is reliable and easy to use, so SWICA doesn’t need to recruit coding experts.
“With MuleSoft, we can do everything in one platform. We’re not switching between tools for every part of the integration, we don’t need to individually secure all the components that work together, and we can build a strong integration platform with middle-grade developers,” said Andres. “It also makes it much easier to carry out compliance checks and ensure we’re meeting high standards across the organization.”
Next, SWICA plans to build more dashboards in MuleSoft using Anypoint Monitoring and also in Microsoft Azure App Insights with MuleSoft logs. This will provide a better overview of its KPIs so it can use this information to optimize its environment for efficiency.
The flexibility of the Anypoint Platform will continue to streamline SWICA’s move from on-premises to the cloud. Ultimately, the team plans to use a container-based Kubernetes environment and wants to migrate from an American to a European control plane. MuleSoft isn’t just compatible with this changing environment, it has clear, predictable costs which helps the company stay on budget.
