A Federal First: How GDIT and CMS Set a New Standard for Healthcare System Resilience

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When the system responsible for processing claims and payments for half of America's healthcare goes down, the consequences are immediate and far-reaching. For the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), ensuring that never happens isn't just an IT priority — it's a mission imperative.

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In an unprecedented move, GDIT partnered with CMS to operate the Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System (HIGLAS) entirely from a disaster recovery (DR) environment for a full year. The result: zero data loss, zero service loss, and zero operational impact to the 160 million Americans who depend on CMS for their healthcare coverage.

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No other federal agency has completed a DR operation of this length, magnitude, or scope for financial systems of this scale. HIGLAS processes $1.7 trillion in payments annually, and maintaining its availability, security, and performance while running exclusively from an alternate site required sustained collaboration between CMS leadership, the agency's Financial Management Systems Group, and GDIT.

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Throughout the year-long operation, the team didn't simply hold the line; they ran financial reconciliations, maintained security monitoring, executed incident response, advanced Zero Trust improvements, and kept the experience seamless for users and partners — including maintaining over 40 external connections into U.S. Treasury systems, all with zero failover data loss.

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The performance gains tell the story clearly. Recovery time for HIGLAS in the event of a real disaster dropped from six hours in 2021 to under two hours and forty minutes — a transformation that dramatically strengthens CMS's ability to respond to the unexpected.

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For federal agencies navigating increasingly complex IT environments, the lesson from CMS is straightforward: resilience isn't a backup plan. With the right partnership and the right commitment to continuous improvement, it can become a driver of modernization itself.

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