Federal First: GDIT and CMS Set New Standard for System Resilience Supporting Half of America’s Healthcare

Supporting half of the American healthcare system, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System (HIGLAS) processes 1.2 billion claims annually and nearly $1.5 billion in payments to healthcare providers daily.

To ensure this highly critical system is always available and secure, GDIT partnered with CMS to run HIGLAS entirely from a disaster recovery (DR) environment for a complete year, processing claims and payments for half of our nation’s healthcare with zero data loss, zero service loss and zero operational impact.

This unprecedented achievement has solidified CMS as the first federal agency to complete a DR event of this length, magnitude, and scope, setting a new standard for federal financial operations. Getting there required meeting one of the most demanding operating environments in federal IT.

While disaster recovery environments are normally used for system failures, running HIGLAS on DR proved the highly available environment, processes and team could operate in an environment without impact or downgrade in performance. All while still meeting the operational priorities of the federal government and serving the American public.

If a natural or manmade disaster were to impact HIGLAS, many vital CMS operations would be rendered inoperable, impacting half of the American healthcare system. Because of its mission criticality and impact on millions of Americans’ lives, HIGLAS is categorized by as a federal High-Value Asset. As a result, HIGLAS is required to have a robust disaster recovery program in place.

The success of the year-long DR operation was made possible through trusted partnership with CMS leadership, the agency’s Financial Management Systems Group, and GDIT. Through sustained collaboration, the team successfully maintained service levels, implemented modernization initiatives and strengthened CMS's enterprise resilience without disruption to daily operations.

CMS requires periodic, functional testing of the HIGLAS DR program and, just like actual disasters, those tests occur with little to no warning. The goal of DR exercises is to strengthen CMS’s resiliency to any potential disruptions by failing over to a robust alternate datacenter across the country from the production site with alternate network equipment, circuits and power grid.

To ensure constant readiness for a disaster event, GDIT meets and exceeds a series of recovery requirements for high availability while meeting the same service level agreements of connectivity and communications to endpoints as the production site.

After executing failover with zero data loss, CMS ran HIGLAS production systems at the alternate DR site for the full year. The team ran financial reconciliations, security monitoring, incident response, stakeholder communications and Zero Trust improvements while keeping the experience seamless to users and partners. GDIT also maintained over 40 external connections including those into U.S. Treasury systems, with zero failover data loss.