The Challenge

Around eight million insured individuals rely on BARMER, one of Germany’s largest statutory health insurance funds. They benefit from comprehensive services, first-class medical care and excellent online experience. Through these offerings, BARMER actively contributes to a human-centered and sustainable healthcare system by focusing on three key areas: sustainability, transparency, and digital responsibility. In the area of digital responsibility, BARMER is facing rising expectations and increasing complexity, particularly with regard to managing the rapidly growing volume of documents.

Legacy system unable to handle document growth 

With roughly 1.1 billion documents, BARMER’s applications could no longer run at the required performance level on the legacy system. This was not solely a technological issue: the volume of documents had increased significantly, and expectations for such a system in a digital environment had fundamentally changed. The numbers highlight the scale of the problem: in 2010, BARMER had around 130 million documents to manage and archive. Since then, driven in part by mergers within the organization, this figure has increased by tens of millions each year. Furthermore, the ongoing digitalization process generates new types of documents and files, such as attachments or digital signatures, which must be carefully archived and made accessible for operational workflows.

Additionally, the quantitative momentum of digitization was reinforced by a qualitative one: Insurance customers increasingly demand online access to a variety of services. To meet this demand and handle the growing volume of documents, the platform needed to be modernized. Furthermore, operating the existing solution was challenging: "Due to the large amounts of data, updates caused interruptions that lasted longer than desired. This is unacceptable for a health insurance company because documents are central to its business operations," says Roland Bruns, CIO at BARMER.

Ultimately, the organization used the transition as an opportunity to take a significant step forward. It aimed to move away not only from the legacy system but also from the previous data center operator that the fund had used with other insurers. These changes placed high demands on the migration process and operation of the new solution, which had to run in the background simultaneously.

The solution – Hyland Nuxeo as the new platform

BARMER selected Hyland’s Nuxeo, a highly scalable, cloud-native content services platform. Numerous workflows and 18 of the organization’s software systems were integrated with the platform. In close coordination with the responsible teams at BARMER, Hyland partner Prime Force successfully implemented the project, enabling more than 2.5 million daily document access from applications and the archive.
„Now, we can truly speak of a high-performance system with very high availability. Long downtimes are a thing of the past. In our view, switching to the Nuxeo platform and collaborating closely with our implementation and operations partner, Prime Force, was the right decision,” says Matthias Bendorf, Project Manager at BARMER.

Well-defined requirements ensure project success 

This transformation yielded such good results because BARMER defined the requirements profile precisely in its tender. This prevented misunderstandings and enabled the project to begin immediately.

It was also important to the user company that Hyland Nuxeo is an open-source solution offering an extensive marketplace for add-on applications and drawing on a very active community of supportive user groups. The decision in favor of Hyland was also influenced by the transparent pricing model, which is based on server instances rather than users.

Following their successful bid, the project partners BARMER, Prime Force and Hyland worked closely together to begin the project.

The test phase went smoothly and was successful, so they then ventured to tackle the entire data inventory. The result: 1.1 billion documents and almost three billion data records were migrated within 42 days, providing a high-performance solution to which workflows and other software systems are connected. All document access takes place via the platform. The documents range in size from around 50 kilobytes to several hundred megabytes, which presented no additional challenge.

 „The main challenge in the migration process was reading the data from the legacy system. Nuxeo itself was never too slow,” reports Holger Strack, Managing Consultant at Prime Force.

In technical terms, the underlying concept for success was as follows: integration with a WORM hardware system, such as Centera or ECS (using the CAS protocol), ensures long-term archiving that cannot be altered. This is essential for compliance and audit-proof storage, which is vital for a health insurance company. Content services systems benefit from increased data security, integrity and compliance with regulatory requirements. In BARMER's case, it was advantageous that the long-term archived documents and data from different specialist systems on the ECS (WORM) remained unchanged in the same storage location and could still be accessed as documents in Nuxeo. Physically moving the documents would have been uneconomical and significantly more time-consuming. To this end, Prime Force developed a WORM system storage extension (plug-in) for Nuxeo. During the migration process, the files (approximately 300 TB) remained on the WORM system, with only the associated metadata being transferred to Nuxeo.

Input management, output management, several SAP systems and a number of other specialist systems are all connected to Nuxeo. Prime Force operates and maintains the solution as a managed service. „Technically, this migration presented particular challenges, and the rate of change in documents and files is far from standard. This makes it clear that it was a successful project, especially thanks to the close cooperation between Hyland and BARMER. It's a partnership that works in every way,” says Thomas Pesendorfer, CTO of Prime Force.

The difference lies in flexibility and scalability

Nuxeo is based on a cloud-native, low-code architecture that enables the rapid development of new applications and the modernization of existing processes. Its modular, cloud-first structure can be scaled flexibly and independently to handle even very large workloads in real time. The platform's integrated workflow and automation features help companies to streamline their processes and stay competitive.

Excellent partnership for successful projects

Hyland and Prime Force have a long-standing partnership based on the successful completion of numerous content services projects. In the case of BARMER, their roles complement each other perfectly. Hyland provides the flexible and powerful Nuxeo platform, and Prime Force handles integration, migration, and ongoing operation as a managed service. Close coordination between all parties ensured a smooth implementation process. This demonstrates how combining technology and project expertise in a close partnership can lead to sustainable results.