Medibank Private has selected Eternity Private Health's iMed software as part of a strategic program to automate the processing and calculating of member benefits and improve the flexibility of its IT environment.

The health fund's decision to overhaul its legacy systems is a central component of Medibank Private's Business Systems Renewal program, which aims to significantly enhance Medibank Private's claims processing and improve customer service.

CIO Surinder Singh said following a strategic review to align business and IT strategies, Medibank Private has partnered with Eternity and Sybase to provide the software platform and tools to build new systems that will run core business processes.

"We believe the technology is the right choice to help us deliver improved service quality to our nearly three million members and improve the customer experience," Singh said.

Medibank Private's selection includes Sybase PowerDesigner and PowerBuilder tools to design and develop its new generation of core systems.

The new systems will have a Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) cluster backend to provide near continuous access to applications and data. By leveraging the cluster architecture, two ASE databases can work as companions to each other, enabling client connections and database operations to instantly move from one server to the other without interruption to end-users.

In addition, Medibank Private will implement Sybase Real-Time Data Services (RTDS) to streamline the delivery of time-critical information from internal databases to health service providers and members. RTDS will proactively push time-critical data from Medibank Private's heterogeneous enterprise databases to its messaging architectures, eliminating the "information lags" created by batch updates or intermittent polling processes.

Eternity Health's Cumulus iMed transaction engine uses Sybase as the main repository for data to process and calculate Medibank Private's premiums, assessment of claims, benefits, policy and product details, and provider contract information.

Eternity Health CIO Cornel Viljoen said Cumulus iMed is a customer-centric system that has focused around imbedded workflow for claims processing, CRM reporting, provider contract management, and contributor collection.

"We look forward to working with both Medibank Private and Sybase in what is our first major deal in Australia," Viljoen said.