Excellent Web Experiences: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida

BCBSF in many ways is the epitomy of a great web experience.  They have created a variety of valuable online tools that can be found via web sites, internally, and on mobile sites.  Lisa Crawford of BCBSF and Glenn Kline of Perficient went through how they maximize ROI at BCBSF.

Where they were in 2008:

• Lots of transactions available on the site
• But they were hard to find
• and they weren’t easy to use

Internal care tool

Runs on the Portal and used by the specialty care team.  They give cost comparisons to members.  It reuses and integrates many different services.

The cost comparison was for things like mammography where private non-hospital centers were better and cheaper.   The internal tool allows the care team to get the data and compare costs and quality.

• 96% satisfaction rate
• 2,752 calls from mobile phones
• 4 weeks of work reduced to 15 minutes when aggregating the information

Cost savings

• Knee replacement: 15% or $3,500
• Cholesterol lowering drugs: 91% of $1,600 / year
• MRI of the Spine:32%

Technical Details:

• Uses the same portal infrastructure as existing member portal
• re-uses a lot of the same portal services which cut down on development time
• Does a provider search based on a member’s benefits (used the same provider search service already in the portal)
• Allows you to price 12 procedures across 6 different providers
• Did integration with Ingenix to to procedure code lookup. (Huge timesaver as this used to be a manual lookup)
• It’s adjudicated in real time since it hits the actual claims system
• WebSphere Portal is the glue
• Websphere Application Server
• Data Power is used for all web services and SSO to external vendors
• DB2
• iLog
• Services tier with web services and Spring Remote
• and a number of others

Quote: we pull up 17 different systems on the home page and do it under 5 seconds.

Third Party Integration

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Core to the member portal is a number of integrations from external vendors.  They provide some key functionality like:

1. Health Savings Accounts through ACS Mellon.  They did Single Sign On (key) and display the HSA balance using webservices for a seamless experience
2. Health Dialog
3. WebMD provided care comparison, hospital comparison and 28 other tools.
4. Check Free is used for online bill payment.

Mobile

You need to figure out your strategy. What do you want the channel to do for you?  Provide service?  Is it a revenue channel?  Figure out the strategy and then your scope and functionality flows from it.

BCBSF decided to create mobile web sites and native applications.  The native applications were very specific on what they did.

Question: How did you figure out what to for mobile?  Answer: BCBSF used focus groups with a good partner.   They asked about what was possible.  BCBSF found out their initial take was only about 50% right.  The business also provided some key guidance.  Shopping is available via mobile because of business guidance.

Note: BCBSF didn’t originally use Portal for the site but is in the process of revising their view because of what’s coming up with the soon to be released IBM Mobile themes.

Native apps are more difficult to create.  There are also a number of things they cannot do in the native app because of security issues.

How does portal technology save Money

• Increased availability through decoupling.  Adding new functionality becomes easier because it’s naturally decoupled.  You can also use Personalization to decide what to show based on service availability, dates, etc.
• Use IBM Web Content Manager.  One authoring environment feeds all the portals and facebook
• Personalization can respond to large company’s needs.  Write a PZN rule from the admin console and deliver tailored capabilities and messages without huge and heavy release testing from code.
• Respond quickly to HIPAA or compliance requests.  Because it’s decoupled, you can take down functionality with compliance concerns and not take down the entire site.
• Member emulation: Your call center people can see exactly what a member sees.
• Lots of code reuse
• Reduced development time

Passive Analytics vs Smart Analytics

Passive web analytics are about reporting.  Get stats and see trends.  See what users clicked on.  Determing the value of content. React to trends and adapt content or services.

Smart analytics are about behaviors.   Track at an individual level.  It’s used as an input to business intelligence systems.  It allows you to dynamically adapt content and services to user behaviors.  BCBSF puts offers out and then tracks on whether the person responds. Based on response or non-response, the systems adapts with different offers, discontinued offers, etc.  BCBSF even uses a blue points system to have members earn points by acting within the portal.

One example, target users who are using expensive name brand drugs instead of cheaper alternatives.  Incent the user to view alternatives and capture that action.  Smart metrics are oriented to the individual

So what about the future?

A cost and quality tool to let members figure out what costs are for procedures and compare them at different facilities.  This will make healthcare more transparent.

Doctor ratings.  Initially the doctors were concerned but have gotten used to it

Question: what are you thinking about with Social?  Answer: put more functionality where the consumers are.  They are on facebook so the plan is to bring a variety of services there.  The full scope isn’t set, just the philosphy.