Health Insurance Company Revitalizes Its Mobile Strategy and Positions Itself for Game-Changing Innovation
What we achieved
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Reusable components for easy app dev
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Fast Multi-channel deployment
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Agile business strategy support
To who
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Industry: Health Insurance
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Products: HCL Volt MX
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Region: North America/US
Overview
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Part 1
Challenge
A major health insurance company needed to modernize its siloed and high-maintenance apps and development processes and bolster its mobile presence.
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Part 2
Solution
HCL Volt MX enables them to use the same code base for mobile and desktop applications and to cost-effectively make changes quickly and deploy anywhere.
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Part 3
Results
Now 600K+ members and 3K partners use this company’s mobile apps to access a portal that enables successful business interactions and transactions.
The Challenge
Bolstering a Mobile Presence
This company knows just how difficult it is to succeed in the mobile space. As a national health insurance provider, it recognized that a full arsenal of mobile tools and capabilities was needed to help serve millions of its customers and energize its mobile strategy. This is the leading health insurance organization in the Northeast United States. With its affiliates, it serves nearly 9 million people in 32 states, as well as 2.5 million in the District of Columbia.
This company embarked on an effort several years ago to bolster its mobile presence. It stitched together contracts with a handful of third parties, and then had one of those partners build a mobile application by screen-scraping its member portal, but it was built on older technology and the results were not entirely satisfying.
The application was siloed, allowing users to see only the most basic information and with limited ability to interact with it. Changes to the main portal screen would cause the app to break, and when bugs were identified, the insurance company was charged for the fixes, which had to be completed separately for each mobile platform. And if that wasn’t enough, the app was receiving poor reviews in various app stores.
“It was a problem,” said the Director of Enterprise Architecture and Consumer Mobile Solutions. “I knew there was a better way.” What they needed was a “write once, publish anywhere” mobile platform. The director believed what the company needed was a state-of-the-art mobile platform that would put the company in firm control of its mobile strategy -- One that would enable the company to roll out applications using the latest technologies. One that would allow for seamless movement of data and processes between members’ mobile devices and the company’s portal and back-end systems. And, perhaps most important, one that made all of the company’s development efforts repeatable across multiple mobile and desktop platforms.
With HCL Volt MX we delivered a beautiful mobile experience with customizations and powerful enhancements. It was a raging success.
—Director of Enterprise Architecture and Consumer Mobile Solutions
The Solution
A Raging Success
The search led to the HCL Volt MX platform. “Being able to leverage the same code base for mobile and desktop — that’s really what Volt MX brought to the table,” said the director. “HCL Volt MX allows us to cost-effectively make changes quickly and deploy on different channels.” The team got to work right away and built a new prototype of its consumer app. The HCL Volt MX platform enabled the company to add new features, such as a “medicine cabinet,” which acts like a mission control center for prescriptions. The app also manages members’ current and historical prescription drug data, delivers updated information from drug makers, and provides members with reminders to take their medications. When the new app was released, a few months after the company first engaged with the HCL Volt MX platform, the director knew the company had a winner. “We delivered a beautiful mobile experience with customizations and powerful enhancements,” he said. “It was a raging success.”
Building on initial success, the floodgates opened. The team built an app for one of its subsidiaries, quickly whipping up a customized version of its member app. Then the company turned its attention to its member portal, using a middleware investment the company made before adopting the HCL Volt MX platform, and HCL Volt MX allowed for the middleware app code to be reused, meaning 80% of the work on the portal was already done. As a result, the portal was refreshed in just a few weeks, including some new capabilities for the member relations staff, such as a document-sharing function and a campaign management system with built-in notifications.
The company is far from done innovating. For instance, the team is working on a personal health information repository function in the portal that’s expected to be rolled out soon. It gives members greater guidance and opportunity for self-help steps. The company is even forming partnerships with hospitals so it can incorporate discharge instructions into a member’s repository.
Being able to leverage the same code base for mobile and desktop — that’s really what HCL Volt MX brought to the table. The platform allows us to cost effectively make changes quickly and deploy on different channels.
—Director of Enterprise Architecture and Consumer Mobile Solutions
The Results
Today, the portal has more than 600,000 registered members, a number that’s been fueled by the success of the new mobile app. It also built a capability to track the interaction members have with the various tools, online or off, and use that data to generate reports and improve customer experiences.
With the member environment addressed, the mobile development team turned its attention to the company’s network of brokers. It built a cutting-edge agent insight mobile app, which serves a population of about 3,000 brokers and third-party agents. It is helping the company track agent attendance at Medicare-mandated educational sessions. This is helping the company comply with a federal requirement that it submit proof that its agents have conducted a sufficient number of these educational sessions.
The company has seen business improvements across the board since adopting the HCL Volt MX technology — things like better cost-control efficiencies, improved first call resolution, and higher customer satisfaction scores.
The three areas in which the company has seen payoffs are:
- Being able to effectively reallocate IT resources and save money in the process.
- Ability to adopt an agile methodology.
- Being able to attract new, agile IT workers who are more in tune with mobile and social technologies than the growing population of millennial members are accustomed to.
“What HCL Volt MX allows us to do is get more business functionality out the door quicker, and it allows us to do things in a little fancier way,” said the director.
Looking ahead and in response to numerous requests to deliver all of its mobile functionality in Spanish, HCL Volt MX has provided a framework to generate translations on the portal, and the team is working on migrating those translations to the company’s mobile app.
The company clearly has come a long way from its initial attempts at developing a mobile strategy, and it has no intention of looking back. Said the director: “HLC Volt MX is helping us pave a mobile path into the future.”
About the company
The company is the leading health insurance organization in northeast US. With its affiliates, they serve nearly 9 million people in 32 states, as well as 2.5 million in the District of Columbia.
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