Case Study: DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority achieves $1.8M annual savings and a scalable, compliant cloud marketplace with Amazon Web Services

DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority - Customer Case Study

The DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority (HBX) operates DC Health Link, Washington, DC’s state-based online marketplace for individual and small‑group health plans. After launching on commercial off‑the‑shelf (COTS) software, HBX faced escalating licensing and change‑request costs, slow six‑to‑twelve‑month development cycles, frequent downtime for upgrades, and limited scalability that threatened enrollment and service goals.

To solve this, HBX rebuilt the platform on open‑source code in the AWS cloud, adopting agile development and cloud services (including EC2, S3, RDS and related tools) to enable rapid, weekly deployments without system outages. The migration cut costs by about $1.8 million annually (plus $250,000 in data‑center savings), met federal security standards, supported SHOP enrollment growth from ~20,000 to 75,000 covered lives, reduced call volume and escalations, won industry recognition, and allowed HBX to host another state’s SHOP solution while sharing future improvement costs.

DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority