PICC Health Insurance Co., Ltd. (PICC Health) is the first professional health insurance company in China, established in 2005 as a joint venture between PICC — a Fortune Global 500 company — and DKV, Europe's largest health insurer. With registered capital of CNY 8.568 billion, PICC Health operates as China's most financially robust health insurance specialist. The company runs its online health insurance platform on OceanBase, processing over 1 billion rows of customer data across its internet insurance products, including the widely popular Good Medical Insurance available through Alipay.

Business Challenges

As a new project launched by PICC Health in April 2018, the Online Health Insurance project has been running for over a year. Now it has more than 1 billion rows of customer data with a total volume of more than 100 GB. As the project develops, the data volume keeps growing.

The conventional centralized IT architecture is unable to meet the high concurrency requirements. Moreover, its poor horizontal scalability makes it difficult to support emerging applications such as applications in big data and artificial intelligence. In addition, the original business system took a long time to issue insurance policies, launch new products, and recover from service failures, resulting in poor customer experience. For example, the conventional practice of batch processing at night is time-consuming. However, the batch processing time is cut from hours to minutes after using OceanBase. Because OceanBase supports high performance and complex queries even for big data and PICC adjusted its batch processing method.

Solution

By using OceanBase and the SOFAStack distributed middleware of Ant Group, PICC Health solved the problem of slow concurrent policy processing and is now able to issue approximately 150,000 policies daily on average. OceanBase supports complex JOIN and UNION queries. Therefore, customers can use it for complex queries, multi-table joins, and handling big data in a single transaction.

Benefits

With a new architecture that uses OceanBase Database as the core computing and processing database, PICC Health issues 3,400 policies per minute on average, using only six Q41 physical servers and three Q46 physical servers. Launched on April 11, 2018, Good Medical Insurance of PICC Health has become one of the most popular insurance products in Alipay. After deploying OceanBase Database, PICC Health has made many significant achievements:

Enhanced the processing capability by one thousand times and is able to dynamically scale out based on business conditions.

Increased the daily document processing speed by reducing the time for processing 10,000 policies of the 2018 Good Medical Insurance Hospital Room and Board Insurance from 4 hours to 6 minutes.

Reduced the launch time of new products by more than 80%, from several weeks to several days.

Adopted multi-protocol conversion and standardized integration processes to increase the access efficiency of external channels by 6 times, which is helpful for the rapid expansion of the third-party business.