Phani Kanakala of Florida Blue and Charles Mahoney of Perficient presented a member portal case study at the 2015 IBM Digital Experience Conference. Florida has continually evolved their digital experience since releasing their first member portal on the IBM Digital Experience platform in 2008. Florida Blue is the largest health insurance provider in Florida with over 4.3 million members and all lines of business serving almost 15 million members. The session focused on how Florida Blue has evolved from their digital experience over the last several years due to changing consumer needs and demands as well as outside influences such as the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Consumer Engagement Evolution Roadmap
Phani started off with a great overview of Florida’s journey and discussed many of the business challenges they faced. At a high level, Florida evolved along the following roadmap
- 2006 – Visitor only portals
- 2008 – New self service portal on WebSphere Portal
- 2010 – Released first mobile website and iPhone applications
- 2011 – Consumer transparency
- 2012 – Analytics, guided selling and cost tools
- 2013 – Ready for the health care reform (HCR)
- 2014 – HCR self service, personalization, analytics
- 2015 – Digital experience and continued multi-channel delivery
What Florida Blue has today
Phani then showed a great video demonstration of the Florida Blue member site. See it below:
Phani then highlighted many of the challenges such as changing consumer demands, HCR, business demands etc. and how they are included in their multi-year digital transformation strategy. The strategy has four key pillars including a foundation, transformation, innovation and outcomes. Charles then did a deeper dive of Florida Blue’s delivery best practices. Some of the highlights are below.
IBM Products Power the Solution
- IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management
- IBM Tealeaf
- IBM iLOG
- IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance
- IBM WebSphere Application Server
- IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator
Content Management
A single authoring environment sources multiple production environments at Florida. This allows business years to publish dynamic and persuasive content to users.
Personalization
The portal’s personalization engine is used extensively to personalize an experience based on a member’s policy and products. This also enables delivering business needs quickly without large releases.
Performance
Performance is absolutely critical. The site has a 5 second page load SLA and there are integrations from over a dozen systems. Many performance best practices are in place to meet this SLA including performance tuning, caching, service optimization and they are validated through performance testing.
User Experience
The key to a great digital experience is designing for the customer with the customer. Florida involves the customers in the design process through prototyping and usability testing, feedback through surveys and social media and analytics. The site continually evolves based on user input.
Florida Blue is a regular speaker at IBM conferences and it is always interesting and informative to hear what they are doing as they are viewed as a leader in digital experiences in the healthcare payer industry.
