CVS Health Corporation is an American retail pharmacy and health care company. In 2017, the company ranked seventh on the Fortune 500 and 18th on the Fortune Global 500 list with \$177B in annual revenue. CVS Health subsidiaries-which include CVS Pharmacy, CVS Caremark, CVS Specialty, and MinuteClinic-employ over 200,000 people and are household names in retail and healthcare/pharmacy in North America.

CVS Health Needed to Replace their Legacy ECM Solution

CVS Health is a “pharmacy innovation company,” with innovation playing a critical role in its overall mission: Helping people on their path to better health. This focus extends beyond the retail pharmacy aspect of its operations that it is most widely known for as CVS Health is continuously looking at how it can modernize its back-office processes and IT landscape in a manner that enables the company to deliver on its mission.

For more than a decade, CVS Health had been using a knowledge management solution called CareSource, which is a mission-critical solution that 20,000-25,000 customer care agents use to help serve the retail pharmacies, specialty providers, and other health care entities CVS Health supports.

Executive management and IT leadership recognized that CareSource was built on aging legacy technology that needed to be replaced. The underlying architecture was outdated and had not been refreshed in over 10 years. As a result, agility and flexibility was limited with old solution, and the platform couldn’t keep up with the demands of the business.

We needed a platform with better search capabilities, document storage, and other 21st century content services technologies. We were using ‘end of life’ technology from a proprietary vendor, and it simply was not meeting our needs and requirements.
CVS Health Architect

Nuxeo – The Flexible, Open, and Highly-Scalable Alternative

In 2016, the IT team at CVS Health was given guidance from executive leadership to update their knowledge management platform with a modern open source approach that would reduce the company’s dependence on IBM, Oracle, and other proprietary solutions.

“We ended up looking at both proprietary solutions and open-source offerings. We wanted to evaluate everything because we weren’t sure about the maturity of open source solutions. This is a business-critical operation for us, so we had to look at all options.”

CVS Health evaluated several vendors and ultimately selected Nuxeo because the highly-scalable and open source content platform provided the company with the flexibility to introduce new solutions in the future without worrying about being constrained by proprietary technology.

We looked at other Nuxeo implementations, particularly their larger deployments with well-established brands. This was important to us because we knew if those companies had the confidence in the Nuxeo Platform to serve as the backbone for their mission-critical solutions, then that would tell us what we needed to know about the maturity of their platform and technology.

CVS Health engaged with Nuxeo to assist their incumbent system integrator on the deployment of a new knowledge management solution called “TheSource.”

Smooth Transition to Full Deployment

Because of its mission-critical nature, CVS Health took a phased approach in how it transitioned its solution from IBM FileNet to Nuxeo. The company ran the old system (CareSource) in parallel with the new Nuxeo-based platform (TheSource) for three months to help ensure a smooth and seamless transition. With Nuxeo as its foundation, TheSource went live in late 2017.

TheSource is a mission critical solution that facilitates internal communication between more than 60 internal CVS departments including mail services, clinical services, patient care, specialty providers, and more.

It supports approximately 20,000 – 25,000 users who actively use the system to access and manage CVS customer-specific documentation such as plan data sheets, work instructions, plan talk tracks, announcements, training guides, and other important files employers need in order to communicate the CVS-related benefits available to their employees. In this process, having the most accurate and up to date documentation is critical.

Search Improvements Improve Customer Service

Every employer CVS Health works with has a different plan, and different coverage levels for their staff. As one would expect, it’s vital that CVS Health call center representatives are able to quickly access the most current coverage details for each plan.

The new UI and easy search capabilities are great - they no longer have to memorize their search parameters. Our customer care agents can find the up-to-date information they need faster. The improvement in search is definitely one of the biggest benefits we’ve seen.

“If the CDC makes an announcement about a drug recall or another situation like that where it’s absolutely vital that our call center reps must know about something immediately, we’re confident that the Nuxeo Content Services Platform will enable us to inform our reps ASAP. This is critical not only for our business, but also for the well-being of the millions of people who use CVS services through their employers.”

CVS Taps Nuxeo to Replace Another Legacy System for Internal and External Portal Content

CVS leveraged the success of the initial project with Nuxeo (TheSource) to embark on a second project to replace Oracle Stellent, which was used as a content management solution for managing policies, procedures, and content for internal and external portals. Similar guidance from executive leadership was given for this project as in the first project – find an open, modern, and highly-scalable platform to replace their aging legacy system.

We’re very pleased with Nuxeo’s commitment to driving our success and supporting the mission of our company. With the success of these first two projects, we’re looking into how we can leverage Nuxeo in other areas of business.

In addition to the open and adaptable nature of its Content Services Platform, CVS chose Nuxeo because of its multi-tenant content services architecture that allowed CVS to provide separate content workflow software, metamodels, and security models isolated and configured to meet the specific needs of each of its tenant stakeholder groups. Nuxeo also provided seamless enablement of push publication of content to downstream portal applications using workflow and event-driven automation.

The second project to replace Oracle was completed in under six months and is now 100% operational.