Reliable Care, Millions in Savings: The CareSource and Dynatrace Success Story – YouTube
This article uses the CareSource example to illustrate how a healthcare organization can transform its IT operations from reactive to proactive — and what that means in practice when system reliability directly affects patient care.
About CareSource
CareSource is a nonprofit managed care organization based in the United States, providing health insurance services to underserved communities through Medicaid and Medicare programs.
- 2 million+ insured members
- 4,500+ employees
- Operations in 8 U.S. states
- One of the largest Medicaid plans in the United States
- As a nonprofit, all investments are directed back into member care
The Stakes in Healthcare IT
The healthcare sector has undergone digital transformation at a pace that has outpaced most forecasts over the past decade. Patient data management, care coordination, and insurance eligibility verification all now depend on critical IT systems. That dependency cuts both ways: the more digital a healthcare organization becomes, the more efficiently it can operate – but the higher the stakes when a system fails.
In most industries, a service outage primarily translates to lost revenue. In healthcare, the same failure can create a care barrier. If a prior authorization system – the mechanism that determines whether a patient is eligible for a particular treatment or medication – goes down or slows significantly, the consequence is not a missed transaction. It is a delayed treatment.
In this environment, reactive IT operations are not sustainable. CareSource, one of the largest Medicaid providers in the United States, recognized exactly that. By building a deliberate observability strategy, the organization established an IT foundation that supports its mission rather than threatening it.
They Already Had an Observability Tool – But Only 5% of the IT Team Was Using It
CareSource did not arrive at this change without observability tooling. They had a solution in place – it simply wasn’t delivering what it should.
Only 5% of the IT team was actively using the system. The rest worked around it, because it was too complex. This is a common failure pattern with certain platforms: they may fulfill their stated purpose on paper, but if using them requires more effort than they save, adoption collapses. The result was a fundamentally reactive operating model: teams began addressing a problem only after it had already become visible – not before.
Leadership recognized that what was needed was not a better tool, but a platform that the team would actually use – one that provided genuine visibility into system health before problems reached members.
The Decision: Why Dynatrace?
CareSource evaluated multiple solutions before making a decision. Dynatrace emerged as the clear choice for two reasons.
The first was the depth of automation. Dynatrace maps interdependencies across systems with no manual configuration, surfacing actionable insights within minutes. This directly addressed the usability problem that had driven teams away from the previous tool.
The second was the Microsoft partnership. A joint program between Dynatrace and Microsoft enabled CareSource to migrate from its on-premises environment to a cloud-based solution in 30 days – with no operational disruption and no additional cost. For an organization of this scale, that matters considerably: migration risk and cost are significant barriers in comparable projects.
Results: Measurable Impact Across Four Dimensions
1. More Reliable Care Delivery Processes
After deploying Dynatrace, CareSource formed a dedicated team to investigate a persistent, difficult-to-diagnose problem: intermittent failures in the prior authorization process – the system that determines patient eligibility for specific treatments and medications. Using Dynatrace, the team rapidly identified the root cause and resolved it in collaboration with technology partners. Service availability for this critical process rose to 99%.
2. Faster Incident Resolution
Under the previous system, identifying a problem could take up to 12 hours. The integration between Dynatrace and ServiceNow now automatically creates incidents and routes them to the appropriate team with full context attached. This reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) to 2 hours. CareSource is targeting a 30% further MTTR reduction by end of 2025.
3. Cost Optimization
CareSource consolidated three separate observability solutions onto a single platform. This alone generated substantial savings in licensing and operational costs: projected savings over three years are approaching $1 million.
4. Unified Visibility
With Dynatrace’s Grail data lakehouse technology, logs and distributed tracing data are accessible from a single platform. Teams no longer switch between disparate tools – they have a single view of what is happening across systems and use the same platform for internal and external communication. The result is faster decision-making and fewer misalignments.
Key Takeaway: What Can Other Organizations Learn?
The CareSource case carries lessons that extend beyond healthcare. The pattern they faced – an existing tool, minimal real-world adoption, reactive operations – will be familiar to IT teams in virtually any large enterprise.
What is especially visible in healthcare also holds true elsewhere: observability only creates value when an organization actually uses it. A platform that 5% of the team uses is not an observability strategy. It is a tool running in the background.
CareSource got three things right. First, they recognized that the problem was not the absence of a tool, but the absence of usability and adoption. Second, they selected a platform that delivers interpretable outcomes quickly, with minimal configuration – driving genuine adoption in the process. Third, they did not treat observability as an IT project. They treated it as an enabler of the organization’s mission.
That shift in perspective is what converts a technical solution into strategic value – regardless of whether the context is healthcare, financial services, or industrial enterprise.
To assess where your organization stands in terms of observability maturity, and to identify the steps toward more proactive IT operations, the Telvice team is available for a complimentary expert consultation.
Source: https://www.dynatrace.com/
