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Industry: Health Insurance
Product(s): BEA WebLogic Server® and BEA WebLogic Portal®
Business Problem: seamlessly integrate disparate people, processes and systems into an efficient and cohesive organization
Project: Business-to-business portal for hospitals, healthcare providers and patients that consolidates 3 previously disparate Web sites.
Why BEA: "What led us to the final decision was BEA's focus on providing a simplified, unified platform, along with the rich functionality we need to address our current business requirements."
Highlights: Consistent, reliable customer experience across the entire Web presence
Agis Healthcare Insurance is one of the leading providers of health insurance in the Netherlands. The company was formed through the merger of three Dutch insurance firms -- Anova, Anoz and ZAO -- and serves more than 1.8 million customers. Agis Healthcare Insurance serves two primary audiences, hospitals and healthcare providers and insured business and individuals (patients).
One of the fundamental challenges facing a company that has grown through acquisition is to seamlessly integrate people, processes and systems into an efficient and cohesive organization. Effective integration and consolidation of resources is key to minimizing costs associated with mergers, maximizing the shareholder value, and ensuring that new and existing customers receive a reliable, predictable level of service.
A second major challenge for Agis is the increasingly competitive insurance sector in the Netherlands. In recent years, aggressive market forces have driven rapid change, and deregulation has allowed new competitors to enter the market. To maintain a leadership position, Agis realized that it would have to evolve its business with an emphasis on increased automation, employee productivity, and self service for insured individuals and healthcare providers.
The information technology (IT) team at Agis made a strategic decision to leverage Internet technologies to address these two primary challenges. Agis decided to build a unified portal that would provide patients, healthcare providers, and hospitals with timely, simplified access to the information and forms they need to conduct insurance transactions. The portal would be a centralized point of access to the applications and legacy systems of all three business units within Agis, ensuring a consistent customer experience.
The new portal offers a wide range of functionality. The goal of the portal is to allow hospitals, healthcare providers and patients to do business with Agis Healthcare Insurance through a single, simplified interface. No longer forced to access multiple systems, patients can perform administrative tasks such as changing their personal information, getting a quote for new insurance coverage, and searching for relevant content. Hospitals and healthcare providers can submit claims through the portal, which route automatically to Poseidon, Agis's claims processing application, and can contact the customer-service department for information about pending claims. In addition, Agis is offering value-added services through the portal such as an information service that allows insured individuals to ask questions about health, answered by licensed healthcare professional. Individuals can also post birth announcements to the portal.
Solution: Service-Oriented Architecture
| Product(s): | BEA WebLogic Server® 8.1 |
Industry: Insurance
Partner: Compuware
Country: The Netherlands
New portal infrastructure underpinned by BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 enabled leading Dutch healthcare provider to deliver fast, effective service—but system was undermined by outmoded, mainframe-based 'green screens'. Deregulation and emerging Health Care Insurance Act are also driving raid market change.
Used BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 to create a GUI-based, user-friendly and functionally rich interface environment. Up to 2,000 services were reused in the development of the new interface. It supports 1,000 concurrent users, 800,000 portal views every day, and as many as two million services are being held daily.
Agents have been extremely satisfied with the breadth of functionality they now have in the unified, GUI-based environment—and agents now have the information at their fingertips to provide a fast, effective, and satisfying response. New BEA system has enabled Agis to reduce the time taken to train agents from 10 weeks to only two weeks. Equally, when demand calls for it, third-party call centers can be switched on more easily. The Service-Oriented Architecture allows Agis to react much more quickly to changes in the business and in the market.
