Cognizant Shows Growing Momentum In Health Sciences

Delivering technology for health sciences can be challenging. This industry is rife with cost, regulation, and privacy concerns, making digital transformation efforts in that market unfathomably tricky. It requires expertise that only arises from deliberate practice over many years and projects. This is a segment where Cognizant is finding significant success.

Cognizant might be the biggest company you’ve never heard of. Cognizant is a professional services company – that employs a workforce of over 350,000 associates. Cognizant makes its money, and furthers its reputation, helping other organizations achieve their digital transformation goals. It has a substantial presence in health sciences, communications, financial services, and automotive, to touch on just a few of its market segments.

Cognizant is successful at what it does. The company has grown from its founding nearly thirty years ago to number 185 on the latest Fortune 500 list. In addition, cognizant’s most recent earnings reported top-line revenue of $4.8B; its overall top-line growth was nearly flat, but its health sciences revenue was up 3.5% year-on-year (only its Communications, Media & Technology group did better). This shows strong demand for what Cognizant is delivering.

TriZetto for Health Sciences

While Cognizant works on digital transformation efforts across various verticals, the company has found substantial recent success in servicing the health sciences sector. Cognizant’s core offering in this space is a framework it calls TriZetto.

Cognizant’s TriZetto Health Sciences offerings are part of a broad portfolio of solutions targeted at helping healthcare providers simplify operations, allowing those organizations to focus on better servicing the healthcare consumer. TriZetto is designed to help provider organizations to maximize revenue growth through increased administrative efficiency. It does this while also improving the cost and quality of care and the overall experience for both patient and provider.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar Singisetti highlighted one major TriZetto win in its most recent earnings call. Mr. Singisetti revealed that Horizon Healthcare Services selected Cognizant to manage Horizon’s claims processor and to counter submissions to the state and enrollment services for Horizon’s 1.2 million members. The renewal agreement with Horizon Healthcare Services spans seven years, during which Cognizant will leverage its TriZetto product suite to help Horizon expedite the claims payment process. That’s just one customer of many.

An Expanding Healthcare Collaboration with Microsoft

Earlier this year, Cognizant announced the expansion of its long-standing healthcare-focused collaboration with Microsoft. As part of the expanded relationship, Cognizant and Microsoft will develop an integration roadmap between the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Cognizant’s own TriZetto healthcare offerings.

Under the expanded agreement, the two companies will work together to bring Cognizant’s healthcare SaaS solutions to Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure, leveraging the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to manage the specific regulatory needs of that industry. Cognizant and Microsoft will also work together to migrate customers from existing on-prem solutions to an Azure-hosted implementation.

This is a familiar relationship for both companies. Cognizant and Microsoft already collaborate on various healthcare provider and payer solutions, including SaaS-based cost estimation. The relationship between the two companies provides greater transparency for healthcare consumers who can use the system to more readily access historical healthcare data, review procedure costs, and even compare pricing across providers. This is all good for consumers navigating complex and difficult-to-use legacy systems.

There are also benefits for providers. For example, running Cognizant’s TriZetto solutions on Microsoft’s cloud allows healthcare providers to quickly adapt to changing market needs, keep up with regulations, and manage shifting operational needs.

Partnering with Boehringer Ingelheim for Cloud-Based Medicinal Therapy Development

TriZetto isn’t Cognizant’s only recent play in the healthcare sector. The company announced in April that it is working with Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading research-driven biopharmaceutical company, to advance the speed and quality of medicinal therapy development.

Cognizant is leveraging the Veeva Development Cloud to build a solution to streamline Boehringer Ingelheim’s therapeutic development workflows. Cognizant will help Boehringer Ingelheim unify medicinal development processes and data into a single connected ecosystem. This should enhance collaboration across clinical, regulatory, and quality control functions.

Boehringer Ingelheim is branding the offering as its “One Medicine Platform.” This new connected ecosystem is expected to be one of the largest global implementations of Veeva technology. By bringing together Boehringer Ingelheim’s clinical, regulatory, and quality functions onto this unified platform simultaneously, the solution is expected to increase interoperability and operational efficiencies.

Cognizant initiated the Boehringer Ingelheim engagement with an analysis of the biopharmaceutical manufacturer’s business and technology, followed by developing the program roadmap and agile methodology for system integration. Collaborating with Veeva, Cognizant is now implementing services, which include program management, system architecture and design, training, data migration, integration, testing and validation services.

The Analyst’s Take

Cognizant is one of the largest professional services organizations in the world. It’s succeeded by helping organizations across industries reach their digital transformation goals, and nowhere is this success more visible and well-earned than in its health sciences business.

Cognizant’s expanded relationship with Microsoft is a strong move for both organizations. With its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft solves many of the problems inherent in bringing sensitive health-related data into the public cloud. Cognizant builds on this with its robust TriZetto offerings. Beyond TriZetto, Cognizant continues to innovate in the health sciences space. Its relationship with Boehringer Ingelheim is another example of that innovation and success.

While Cognizant is fighting headwinds in the macro-economic environment, suffering declines in hard-hit sectors such as finance, it continues to find success in health sciences. That business continues to grow quarter after quarter. Cognizant’s offerings in this space are the right ones. The company’s ability to execute its strategy in health sciences continues to be impressive.