Introduction
As a leader in healthcare workforce enablement, Relias supports over 12,000 organizations and 4.5 million caregivers, delivering connected solutions in learning, compliance, performance, quality, and recruiting that drive measurable outcomes across the care continuum.
With this scale comes enormous complexity and a critical question: How do you maintain exceptional reliability and service quality as your technical complexity expands?
To tackle this, Relias adopted Cortex as a foundational layer for visibility, standardization, and continuous improvement.
1. Driving Reliability Through Clear Ownership and Visibility
Before Cortex, the Relias engineering team encountered scaling challenges managing a rapidly expanding microservices architecture as the company grew.
“Our biggest issue was that we lacked centralized visibility into our repositories and ownership structure, which made fast decision-making incredibly difficult.” – Franz Hemmer, Principal Software Engineer, Relias
Recognizing the need for a more structured and scalable approach, the team implemented Cortex to bring clarity and consistency to their growing engineering ecosystem. Using the Catalog, Relias quickly established 96% ownership coverage across services. Teams could now easily see who was responsible for what, which drastically improved responsiveness and accountability.
2. Elevating Quality Through Standardization and Scorecards
Relias created a Service Maturity Scorecard to define and enforce engineering standards across the board and achieved:
80% unit test code coverage
SonarQube vulnerability scanning
Consistent versioning
Recent commit activity tracking to ensure freshness in critical services
This enabled the team to drive consistency and maintainability at scale. In one remarkable example, Relias completed a .NET migration in just six weeks, a major leap from previous, manual efforts.
The introduction of standardized service templates for new .NET microservices embedded best practices from day one, ensuring that future services start with high-quality foundations.
3. Empowering Teams Through Transparent Workflows
Cortex didn’t just improve metrics — it fundamentally changed the way Relias engineers approached their workflows. Engineers gained visibility into maturity data right where they worked, including Slack. This transparency sparked meaningful, team-led conversations about quality and reliability.
“The Slack integration couldn’t be clearer or more helpful. Every Monday, teams see exactly where they stand and how they can improve.” – Franz Hemmer
“Now we’re having meaningful conversations every day around service maturity, code quality, and reliability because Cortex makes the rules and standards visible to everyone.” – Sagar Thakore, Engineer, Relias
This shift in visibility led to more engaged, empowered engineers and supported a culture of continuous improvement.
The Road Ahead: Engineering Excellence as the Standard
Relias is deepening its Cortex integration, making service quality and operational maturity core parts of daily engineering life. With Cortex, the company isn’t just managing technical debt — it’s reshaping how its teams work, collaborate, and grow.
“With Cortex, we’re not just managing services better; we’re fundamentally changing the way we work and collaborate to support the healthcare organizations who rely on us every day.”– Franz Hemmer
