Progress Gains Significant Momentum in Public Sector with BRMS, Driving Increased Efficiency for Government Agencies in 25+ States

Progress has announced significant momentum in the public sector's use of Progress® Corticon® Business Rules Management System (BRMS), bolstered by several new state agency contract signings and the recent release of Corticon BRMS 5.5. The increase in activity comes as numerous government agencies already leveraging the Progress Corticon solution are seeing rapid returns on investment and significant hikes in productivity. The announcement was made at the ISM Conference, held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, August 30-September 2. 

Many industries rely on complex business rules to run their businesses. These include verticals such as government, healthcare, insurance, real estate, financial services and others that are governed by complex-and constantly changing-policies and regulations. Existing processes, whether manual or automated, can no longer keep up with this rate of change. For example, the Affordable Care Act forced modernization of supporting software applications, as well as brand new systems, to conform with mandated changes to healthcare eligibility and administration. Rather than modify existing systems, most states determined that it would be more cost effective to rewrite the systems using modern business rules engines to guard against ongoing regulatory changes. More than half of U.S. states chose Progress Corticon and have achieved tremendous success improving productivity, assuring compliance with regulation, and delivering better citizen service. 

"In the past year, we have made significant investments in our core Corticon solution—a business rules engine that empowers users to make millions of decisions every day by managing them promptly and efficiently through automation," said Dr. Mark Allen, Vice President, Decision Analytics at Progress. "Corticon BRMS has been embraced by the U.S. government to manage processes such as eligibility determination and benefits administration. Corticon BRMS can help organizations perform at their best, especially in highly regulated industries such as government, healthcare and financial services." 

With the recent Corticon 5.5 "Rules without Limits" release, rule authors can build, develop, test and deploy rules in their platform of choice-Java or .NET. In addition to cross-platform support, other key new features in the Corticon 5.5 solution, such as rule flow branching, adaptive and reusable rule flows, improved thread pooling and high-performance logging, firmly position Corticon BRMS as the industry's leading business rule engine. 

Progress, a long-time provider of BRMS to government clients, has implemented projects with the following state agencies, among many others:

• State of Oregon Health Authority: Using Corticon BRMS, the State of Oregon will be able to create and modify rules quickly, ensuring it is up to date with the latest eligibility requirements. The solution provides a record of what rules are in affect at any given time, and ensures eligible citizens receive the benefits to which they are entitled, all while reducing risk and fraud.
• Texas Teachers Retirement System (TTRS): As part of its Enterprise Modernization Program, TTRS chose Corticon BRMS to ensure that as staff retire and institutional knowledge disappears, business users are still able to provide a high level of service for its members and benefits recipients.
• The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Human Services: Using the Corticon solution, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Human Services has modernized existing systems, moving the hard-coded rules into the flexible Corticon BRMS, and used Corticon BRMS to automate previously manual processes.

"We chose Progress Corticon BRMS over alternative solutions because it was much easier to create and modify rules," said James Weaver, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Public Welfare, Insurance and Aging, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. "The system enables users to use formats and terms that are understandable to non-IT users, so even business analysts can translate policy into rules easily, on their own."