Building a Scalable Marketing & Communication Data Platform for Connecture

Executive Summary

ConnectureDRX, a leader in Medicare enrollment and drug transparency technologies for over 20 years, partnered with Mutt Data to address the evolving needs of the Medicare market. ConnectureDRX has been at the forefront of Medicare enrollment and drug transparency technology, helping health plans, agents, and consumers navigate the complexities of Medicare with ease. Connecture sought to enhance their plan recommendation system to better serve individual healthcare needs. Their solutions drive customer growth by delivering a seamless, personalized member experience.

While advanced data analytics and machine learning are part of ConnectureDRX’s long-term vision, the cornerstone of this initiative was the development of a modern data platform to enable those capabilities. The project involved building a robust data platform, integrating diverse data sources, and developing a sophisticated logic engine to drive actionable insights. The result was a scalable, cloud-native solution capable of transforming raw healthcare plan data into actionable insights for agents and agencies across the United States. Through close collaboration and technical innovation, Mutt Data delivered a robust platform that supports personalized, data-driven messaging at scale—strengthening ConnectureDRX’s leadership in the healthcare technology space.

About the Company

ConnectureDRX has been at the forefront of Medicare enrollment and drug transparency technologies for over two decades.

Serving as an intermediary between patients and health agencies, Connecture supports all Medicare plan types, including Prescription Drug Plans (PDP), Medicare Advantage (MA/MAPD), Medicare Supplement (MedSupp), and multiple ancillary products. With over 140 health insurance carriers and more than 150 field marketing organizations (FMOs) and agencies relying on their platforms, Connecture boasts a significant market presence, capturing 95% of the PDP market, 91% of the MA/MAPD market, and 80% of the MedSupp market.

Their extensive experience and unparalleled distribution networks have made them a trusted partner in delivering personalized healthcare experiences to millions of Medicare beneficiaries. Connecture's platforms handle over 4 million enrollment transactions from 2021 to 2023, supporting data from approximately 24,000 health plan variations and quality rating metrics from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Introduction

For over two decades, ConnectureDRX has been at the forefront of healthcare innovation in the United States, empowering millions of Medicare-eligible members to find the right health plan through intuitive comparison and enrollment platforms. With a presence across 95%+ of the PDP and MA/MAPD market, their technology supports carriers, agencies, and agents in delivering a seamless, personalized member experience. ConnectureDRX sought to enhance its communications strategy by building a data platform that could automate the segmentation of member populations and generate targeted messaging campaigns based on real plan changes—such as drug coverage, provider availability, benefits, and premiums.

The Challenge

The Medicare market primarily focuses on pricing, often overlooking individual healthcare needs and preferences. This misalignment results in consumers choosing plans that may not fully meet their requirements, despite being financially attractive. Connecture recognized the need to innovate their plan recommendation system to consider a broader range of factors, such as plan benefits, quality ratings, demographic data, and drug formularies, to provide more tailored and effective recommendations. Furthermore, Connecture aimed to leverage their unique market position to offer analytics services to carriers and agents, enhancing their operations through actionable insights. However, this required a comprehensive understanding of their data resources and the ability to extract valuable insights using advanced analytical methodologies. The project also faced technical challenges, including:

• Data Integration and Volume: Integrating diverse data sources, such as enrollment transactions, member profiles, plan benefits, and drug formularies, and handling large volumes of data (over 4 million enrollment transactions and data from 24,000 health plan variations).
• Data Quality and Schema Changes: Managing data quality issues, such as missing values, inconsistent formats, and changing schemas in new source files.
• Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations and securing sensitive data.
• System Scalability and Adaptability: Building a system capable of adapting to regulatory changes and scalable to handle increasing data volumes and user demands.
• Delivering personalized messaging recommendations through a secure and anonymized interface.

The task required a scalable and modular data solution—one that would not only meet today’s needs, but also support future expansion into machine learning-driven recommendations and intelligent campaign orchestration.

The Solution

Mutt Data developed a Modern Data Platform (MDP) designed to process, score, and deliver insights about plan changes and their impact on members, empowering agencies with the information needed to support their agent networks effectively.

A Cloud-Native Architecture, Built for Scale

The platform was deployed entirely within the AWS ecosystem, taking advantage of cloud-native components to ensure performance, modularity, and long-term maintainability:

• Amazon S3 for cost-effective and scalable storage of raw and transformed data.
• Apache Iceberg and the Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) to manage data layers and ensure high-quality transformations.
• dbt as the central transformation tool, enabling versioned, testable, and documented data pipelines.
• AWS Glue Data Catalog for structured metadata management.
• Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ensuring automated, reproducible deployments.
• AWS Step Functions and Lambda to orchestrate workflows and scoring logic.
• Transfer Family to ingest files securely from Microsoft SharePoint environments.

From Raw Data to Member-Level Insights

The platform’s analytical core was the Logic Engine—a flexible system capable of assigning impact scores to members based on multiple dimensions of change:

• Drug coverage updates
• Plan Service Area Reductions and Terminations
• Premium shifts
• Benefit structure adjustments

Each member was mapped to one or more audience segments depending on the nature and severity of plan changes, enabling targeted, rules-based messaging to be delivered through agency-facing dashboards.

Secure and Actionable Communication Outputs

While the initial plan called for integration with a third-party BI tool, the final output layer was delivered through Power BI on Microsoft Fabric, offering:

• A user-friendly, multi-tenant interface
• Anonymized member data with re-identification keys held exclusively by the client
• Pre-assigned messaging recommendations based on audience scores

The result was a full-stack solution, from ingestion to insight delivery, built to support healthcare agents in navigating plan changes with greater clarity and speed.

The solution was seamlessly integrated with Connecture's existing infrastructure, ensuring minimal disruption to ongoing operations. Modern DevOps practices facilitated smooth deployments and updates, enhancing system reliability and maintainability.

The Impact

The new platform significantly enhanced ConnectureDRX’s ability to support their stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem:

• It enabled millions of members to be analyzed and scored based on real plan data, identifying who was most impacted and why.
• Agencies were empowered to communicate proactively, delivering the right message to the right audience, at the right time.
• The platform provided a reliable, repeatable framework that can evolve with new use cases, including future ML-driven recommendations.
• Thanks to thorough documentation and a structured knowledge transfer process, ConnectureDRX’s internal team was able to take full ownership of the system post-launch.

Beyond delivering immediate business value, the project also laid the foundation for deeper intelligence, smarter segmentation, and more dynamic communication strategies in the future.

The Results

Conclusion

The collaboration between ConnectureDRX and Mutt Data resulted in a transformative solution that addressed the evolving needs of the Medicare market. By leveraging advanced data analytics and machine learning, the enhanced recommender system provided more personalized and effective plan recommendations, improving user satisfaction and engagement.

The robust data platform enabled Connecture to offer valuable analytics services to carriers and agents, further solidifying their position as an industry leader. This project not only overcame significant technical and regulatory challenges but also set a new standard for innovation in healthcare technology, paving the way for future enhancements and continued excellence in serving Medicare beneficiaries. This project is a clear example of how data platforms can unlock new channels of communication, bring clarity to complex systems, and ultimately improve outcomes across an entire industry.

If you’re looking to bring clarity and scalability to your own data challenges—especially in highly regulated industries— Mutt Data is ready to help.

Let’s connect.