... for Healthcare and Life Sciences

Healthcare has its own reasons for clinging to mainframes, and most of them actually hold up. Claims processing, patient records, insurance eligibility checks, pharmacy benefit management. A lot of it runs on systems built decades ago simply because they've never gone down and they've never leaked anything. That track record counts for a lot. It's also exactly why touching any of it makes people nervous.

The stakes here aren't quite like other industries. A bad migration in banking costs money and trust. A bad migration in healthcare can mean a clinician can't pull up a patient's allergy history in the ER, or a claims system starts denying coverage it shouldn't. HIPAA isn't a checkbox, patient data can't be handled casually at any point in the process, and interoperability standards like HL7 and FHIR add a layer most general modernization vendors have simply never dealt with.

Before getting into names, take a look at Recode. It's a platform for comparing contractors across modernization and migration work, and for healthcare specifically it's a decent way to figure out who's actually touched an EHR or claims system before, versus who's just generally competent with old code.

Here's who's doing solid work in this space.

1. Corsac Technologies

Healthcare systems tend to have a genuinely messy relationship with their own data. Patient records, claims history, and clinical workflows often sit across several legacy systems that were never meant to talk to each other, stitched together by someone who left years ago and never wrote it down.

Corsac's AI-driven approach exists for exactly that kind of mess. It maps dependencies and pulls out business logic before anyone starts touching production, which in a healthcare context means catching an undocumented rule buried in eligibility checks or claims adjudication logic before it becomes an actual patient's problem. Corsac's also got direct experience with EHR and EMR data migration specifically, not just general enterprise work, and that distinction matters once you're dealing with protected health information.

Website: corsactech.com

2. Reliqsy

Reliqsy carries over well here for a similar reason. AI handles discovery, engineers own validation. Their framework analyzes legacy code, maps dependencies, and flags hidden logic, but the decisions about sequencing and rollout stay with people who actually understand the consequences if something goes sideways.

That caution isn't optional in healthcare. A bug that slips into a claims pipeline or a patient data system isn't just annoying, it's a compliance incident somebody has to report. Reliqsy's focus on behavioral validation and controlled rollout, including automated rollback if something looks off post-migration, fits that risk level well.

Website: reliqsy.com

3. IBM

A lot of payer and provider systems are still on IBM Z, for the simple reason that IBM built the thing and nobody else understands it quite as well. Their tooling, watsonx Code Assistant for Z and Red Hat OpenShift among it, tends to push hybrid setups, where core claims or records processing stays put on the mainframe while newer cloud-native pieces get built around it.

If your organization isn't planning to leave IBM Z anytime soon, and a lot of large payers aren't, going straight to IBM cuts out some of the guesswork about what the platform can actually do.

Website: ibm.com

4. CGI

CGI leans tool-driven, centered on their M8 automated modernization environment, targeting Unix and Linux while trying to preserve core business processes along the way. They've done a fair bit of work in government and public sector health programs, which comes with its own flavor of compliance overhead beyond standard HIPAA requirements.

Worth a look if you're dealing with public sector or government-adjacent healthcare systems specifically.

Website: cgi.com

5. HCLTech

HCLTech's "business capability first" philosophy suits healthcare pretty naturally, mostly because a full-system cutover at a hospital or payer almost never actually happens on schedule. Modernizing claims separately from records separately from provider portals, each on its own timeline, shrinks the blast radius when (not if) something doesn't go according to plan.

Their AI-driven code analysis and accelerators cut down manual effort, while staying focused on functional parity, which counts for a lot when "old behavior" includes things like coverage determination logic nobody wants to accidentally break.

Website: hcltech.com

6. Astadia

Astadia's cloud-ready replatforming work, backed by Amdocs, focuses on cutting migration timelines without skipping validation. Their FastTrack methodology and automated testing are pretty industry-agnostic on paper, but they've picked up real healthcare and insurance experience over time, especially around claims and policy administration systems that share a lot structurally with healthcare platforms.

Website: astadia.com

7. Kumaran

Kumaran's been doing this for 30-plus years, using tool-assisted migration methods like their NxTran accelerator for mainframe-to-Java moves. Their process tends toward rehosting or refactoring into microservices, which works reasonably well for healthcare organizations trying to break a monolithic claims or records system into pieces that can actually be deployed independently.

Decent option if predictable, accelerator-driven delivery matters more to you than picking the flashiest name on this list.

Website: kumaran.com

Choosing a partner here

Healthcare modernization comes down to trust more than almost anything else on this list. You're not just picking someone who can migrate code cleanly, you're picking someone who understands what happens if patient data gets mishandled or a claims system starts acting unpredictably. Corsac and Reliqsy make the most sense when the real problem is an undocumented, tangled legacy system that needs to be understood before anyone touches it. IBM fits if you're staying on IBM Z. CGI and HCLTech suit bigger, more phased efforts, especially payer or public sector environments. Astadia and Kumaran are worth a look if you want accelerator-driven, timeline-conscious delivery.

Whoever ends up on your shortlist, ask them directly about HIPAA compliance history and whether they've actually worked on EHR, claims, or clinical systems before, not just generic enterprise software. Recode is a reasonable starting point for comparing that kind of experience across vendors before you commit to anything.