January 22, 2008
Freedom Health Extends Partnership with ikaSystems for a
Total Technology Outsourcing Platform for Five Years.
Freedom Health, a privately
owned Medicare and Medicaid HMO in St. Petersburg, Florida extended
its 3 year partnership with ikaSystems for an additional five years.
This is an Application Service Provider (ASP) contract, wherein
ikaSystems will deliver all IT functions including hosting,
maintaining, providing back-up, replication of data, archiving and
removing redundancy. This would save Freedom health the cost of
creating an in-house IT maintenance team thereby enabling them to
focus on their core business. This also provides a showcase as to
how a twenty thousand member MEDICARE plan can be run with just two
IT resources.
After evaluating many vendors, Freedom health chose ikaEnterprise,
an end-to-end technology solution, which they felt was the most
comprehensive, integrated and reasonably priced offering on the
market. ikaSystems had implemented ikaEnterprise, a total Enterprise
Resource Planning solution for healthcare organizations, at Freedom
Health in September 2005. The system is comprised of a series of
web-based portals designed to automate daily operations, data
warehouse functions and utilization analysis. It also includes a
full-process claims administration system, prospective quality
monitoring, an administrative reporting system and a physician
quality reporting system. Freedom Health has reaped tremendous
benefits after deploying the complete solution, as membership
numbers have tripled in the past three years.
“Our experience with ikaSystems has been very beneficial, both in
terms of the technology provided and the customer service extended
to us over the past two and half years. We were in a rapid growth
phase and ikaSystems has acted as a very effective partner by
helping us achieve this without increasing our staff strength and
providing the seamless and efficient functionality of the portals”
says Chris O’Connor, CFO of Freedom Health “ikaSystems’ leading edge
technology drives our main business processes and we want to be able
to add continued functionality as our business needs keep growing.
To this end we are further strengthening our partnership by signing
a five year technology outsourcing contract with ikaSystems”.
ikaSystems is one of the two leading vendors for Medicare technology
as their CMS gateway has access to the MARx database through a
partnership with Government Works. This makes ikaEnterprise a
complete Medicare IT solution that adds considerable value to the
services being offered to Freedom Health. “We are very pleased that
Freedom Health has extended their contract with us. Providing a
total technology outsourcing platform for the next five years to
Freedom Health further infuses us with pride and confidence in this
partnership” says Ravi Ika, CEO and President of ikaSystems.
About Freedom Health Plan
Freedom Health Plan, a recently incorporated Florida health plan
independently owned and financed by physicians and other private
investors has corporate headquarters in Ocala, Florida with an
operations center located in St. Petersburg, Florida. The company
was founded to design and offer excellent Health Insurance products
to Floridians.
