Availity Modernizes Healthcare Technology through Collaboration with AWS

Availity, the largest real-time health information network in the U.S., supports more than 2,000 health plans and 3 million providers, processing 13 billion clinical, administrative, and financial transactions annually. The company helps exchange vital healthcare data, streamlining processes like patient eligibility verification, claims submission, and remittance advice. Its platform improves efficiency and accuracy for healthcare providers and health plans, reducing administrative burdens, accelerating revenue cycles, and delivering the right information at the right time for more efficient and informed care.

Availity has migrated 90 percent of its IT workloads to AWS and plans to move the remaining systems to the AWS Cloud in 2025. By moving these systems to the cloud, the company aims to reduce infrastructure costs with pay-as-you-go pricing, ensuring it will only pay for the resources utilized while optimizing resource allocation. Additionally, the move to the cloud will free up Availity’s IT team to focus on application development, faster innovation, and enhancing security and resiliency against cyber threats and outages.

After considering several cloud options, Availity chose AWS to accelerate its modernization journey. Michael Privat, chief architect and chief data officer at Availity, explains, “Using AWS, we can build seamless, well-integrated services that support healthcare-grade security, observability, and data governance. Since we began working together in 2020, we’ve realized that working with AWS was 100 percent the right thing to do.”

With migrations on schedule, Availity initiated the transition of its comprehensive Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) application—designed to streamline healthcare payment processes—to AWS. Privat commented, “Even though it's a critical and complex application, we didn’t just want to move it to the cloud; we wanted to rebuild it to enhance resiliency, security, and performance. We questioned whether we could accomplish this internally while staying on schedule, but we lacked the necessary resources. That’s when we realized the value of collaborating with AWS Professional Services."

Availity decided to work with experts from AWS Professional Services on the RCM migration after having a positive experience working with them previously as part of the Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) framework. EBA is an agile methodology that accelerates cloud adoption through hands-on learning. It focuses on high-impact use cases and combines workshops, AWS expert support, and cross-functional collaboration to build cloud fluency and overcome adoption barriers. Jack Hunt, chief technology officer at Availity, recalls, “With AWS Professional Services and the EBA framework, we avoided missteps with our cloud architectures, saving one year of work in one migration and minimizing any impact on customers. The security-first culture that AWS inspires matches our secure design strategy.”

To deliver the RCM migration on time, Availity worked with AWS to draw up a plan that started with a comprehensive assessment of existing infrastructure to identify dependencies and potential challenges. This was followed by strategic planning and architectural reviews for optimal AWS performance. To minimize risks, Availity and AWS experts decided on a phased migration approach. “Usually, when someone proposes a solution, there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s the best way, but that wasn’t the case here. The AWS experts were truly part of our team. They had a solid understanding of our challenges and objectives and knew how to further enhance resiliency, security, and performance,” says Hunt.

Availity also turned to AWS Training and Certification experts to equip its employees with AWS skills for future migrations and cloud operations. “We chose to do a lot of migration work ourselves,” explains Hunt. “We needed our engineers to understand how to migrate to the cloud and work closely with AWS so they could innovate effectively once the project is completed.”

The training program evolved strategically. As Privat describes, “We started very small, with a dozen engineers.” The program then scaled across the organization through AWS Skill Builder on-demand learning paths and interactive AWS Cloud Quest tournaments. “We collaborated with AWS to organize several Cloud Quest tournaments and hackathons. Our developers loved the gamified approach. Nearly all 800 of our developers have completed AWS Training to support our cloud migration. Currently, 31 team members hold AWS Certifications, and nearly 200 have earned AWS badges.”

AWS Training covered multiple domains, from foundational cloud knowledge to specialized skills. Technical and non-technical employees started with AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials training or progressed to more advanced courses such as Advanced Architecting on AWS. To date, AWS has assisted Availity in administering four Cloud Quest tournaments focused on cloud fundamentals, architecture, security, and generative AI, with an AWS Serverless Developer Cloud Quest planned for early 2025.

“A lot of our developers are now taking it a step further and going into more specialized training like security training or generative AI training,” adds Privat. “AWS offers a wide range of specializations that apply to various roles—not just engineers, but also non-engineers.”

Availity continues to expand its training focus into specialized areas like security and generative AI, ensuring teams stay current with emerging technologies while maintaining their cloud expertise.

By working with AWS, Availity has achieved compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), one of the highest U.S. Government regulatory standards. A comprehensive security assessment conducted by AWS was instrumental in this achievement. The process involved using appropriate tools within Availity’s environment and engaging key stakeholders from the cloud services, security, and infrastructure teams. AWS security specialists analyzed the collected data, identified vulnerabilities, and provided actionable recommendations.

Through close collaboration, these efforts not only enhanced compliance but also strengthened Availity’s overall security posture. “Achieving FedRAMP would have been extremely difficult before our cloud migration,” says Privat. “We're proud of our FedRAMP-level security. It's a tough standard to meet, but we think it's the level of security organizations in our industry should be aiming for. AWS brought specialized knowledge and industry expertise critical to achieving this milestone.”

Availity has also improved its disaster recovery posture. Hunt says, “We’ve reduced our Recovery Time Objective (RTO) from hours to minutes as we hone our operations.” With a decreasing RTO, customer service levels will be enhanced. “If our system goes down, a doctor could be stuck waiting for a patient’s service authorization—no one wants that. The stronger our business continuity on AWS, the better the patient experience and health outcomes,” says Privat.

Furthermore, Availity is modernizing its technology infrastructure, reducing routine management time, and accelerating innovation. Says Hunt, “We can iterate faster on AWS, pushing out software releases daily to advance our products—something that wasn’t possible in the past.” Besides releasing new code every 24 hours, Availity can scale its infrastructure rapidly as workloads increase. Privat says, “There are so many things we can do using AWS that we couldn’t do before, like scaling our database to a bigger engine in seconds to minimize latency and processing claims in 30 minutes instead of up to 4 hours—an 87.5 percent improvement.”

With the necessary infrastructure, tools, and support of AWS experts, Availity expanded its adoption of generative AI-driven solutions. In just six months, Availity implemented three Amazon Q services—Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Q in QuickSight—that enhanced development workflows, release management, and data consumption. By integrating Amazon Q Developer as a tool for software development, Availity transformed its development processes, with the tool writing 33 percent of the code and developers accepting 31 percent of its suggestions.

Hunt recalls, “Right before going live, we discovered a potential issue in our architecture design. I watched as a developer used Amazon Q Developer to test different solutions until they found the best one.” Privat adds, “In the end, a single developer and Amazon Q Developer were all it took to resolve the issue.”

Building on the success of Amazon Q Developer, Availity's adoption of Amazon Q Business has further optimized non-technical workflows, particularly in release management. Amazon Q Business automates the retrieval and analysis of committed changes and generates a 100-page report, transforming 2-hour review meetings into 30-minute ones—a 75 percent reduction in review times. This new efficiency also brings enhanced quality and depth of analysis by providing specific insights into code changes.

Lastly, Availity uses Amazon Q in QuickSight to create a monthly digital newspaper, improving data consumption and interpretation across teams. This innovative approach has reduced query response times from days to seconds and empowered non-technical users, such as marketing and sales teams, to explore complex information independently. Data workflows are now streamlined, paving the way for broader AI-driven organizational improvements.