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Press Release
June 13, 2005
ikaSystems Provides Total Business Solution for MEDICA’s Individual Product Custom Solution Automates Entire Sales Process Competitive cost and turnaround time weighed heavily on MEDICA’s decision to choose ikaSystems. “We were very impressed to see the look and feel of our portal at the demo stage,” says Mark Owen, Vice President, General Manager, Center for Healthy Aging at MEDICA Health Plans. ikaSystems demonstrated its robust rating engine customized with MEDICA’s business logic and rate tables at the demo stage, unlike most other vendors who demonstrated generic systems. Another finalist quoted a six to eight month implementation versus one to two months as quoted by ikaSystems. “We sent in our rate tables and business logic and ikaSystems started development immediately,” says Owen. Seeing an actual working product so quickly put ikaSystems ahead of the competition and will make for a “seamless transaction.” It was easy for ikaSystems to provide MEDICA with an actual working rating engine in a short amount of time. “We’ve invested heavily in building a robust and mature rating engine ahead of market so we can offer customers faster implementation, better functionality, and a better price than our competitors,” says Ravi Ika, President and CEO at ikaSystems. ikaSystems’ superior rating engine and online enrollment workflow are expected to bring greatly needed change to MEDICA’s current individual member application and enrollment process. “Having someone manually scrub an application is very labor intensive,” says Owen. The Admin portal provides the “checks and balances” MEDICA needs for faster application enrollment turnaround by eliminating paper and paper-based mistakes, he adds. In a paper-based application enrollment system, errors—such as miscalculated premiums and incomplete information—prove exhaustive and spawn labor-intensive paper-shuffling that bogs down the enrollment process and frustrates applicants and staff alike. MEDICA requires the first month’s premium to enroll an applicant. “If an applicant sends in a miscalculated premium that alone slows down turnaround and increases paperwork,” says Owen. “By implementing ikaSystems’ application quoting system as the front end, MEDICA will receive clean quotes online—without paper or mistakes,” responds Ika. Going paperless will decrease administration time and increase sales, says Owen. Clients can visit MEDICA’s website and apply online rather than request marketing information via telephone, which would arrive via postal service and slow the application process down. Brokers can generate quotes and applications online rather than rely on a manual process, so selling MEDICA’s products becomes easier than selling a product that has paper. About MEDICA MEDICA (www.medica.com) is Minnesota’s largest HMO, largest PPO and leading non-profit and independent provider of health plans. MEDICA has 1.2 million members and nearly 27,000 providers in a regional network service area that includes 98 percent of Minnesotans and a growing number of residents of Wisconsin, North Dakota and South Dakota. MEDICA also offers national network coverage to employers who also have employees outside the MEDICA regional network. HealthLeaders magazine in 2004 honored MEDICA for the nation’s top health plan leadership team. MEDICA has the highest accreditation status, Excellent, from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA®) for its Minnesota and North Dakota Medicaid HMO plans and commercial health plans. |