ISYS Search Software - In Action at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona

Healthcare Corporation Fine Tunes Document Flow

No matter the type of business or the size of a company, professionals around the world are continually dealing with more information (often in paper format) than they can reasonably deal with in a timely manner. Yet despite the emergence of the digital age and the promise of better information management and routing processes, organizations are only now beginning to leverage technology that enables these levels of efficiencies.

Fortunately, these software and hardware solutions are finally coming of age, and as a result, a wide range of businesses are turning some of their once-manual functions into automated processes that require dramatically less time and resources. Such is the case for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona.

As one of Arizona's largest health insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona deals with more paper than most businesses could hope to house in their office space. The very nature of its business is information-intensive, and its ability to compete and meet customer needs is largely dependent on properly managing its various digital and paper documents.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona has 1,400 employees who work with more than 15,000 pages of information for its claims and enrollment systems. Individual users were responsible for working with different portions of those documents, and the office relied on a manual process for routing weekly updates to the user base. This required knowing which pieces of information belonged to what individual. Over the course of a year, this process amounted to a substantial undertaking that was ripe for an automated alternative.

Searching for a better way

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona recognized the need to streamline and automate the procedure. To implement these capabilities, the company's information systems management team elected the ISYS:desktop solution for departmental search and text retrieval. In doing so, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona was able to build an index of its information that could process and route new files and updates automatically.

Using ISYS:desktop's Intelligent Agent technology, the company's administrators established queries that would run in the background to help route new information to the appropriate users, as these updates and new documents arrived in the systems. Apart from the timesaving benefit, this also enabled Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona to set levels of access to the documents.

"We used ISYS to separate what users are able to view," said Carol Von Fange, IS user support manager for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. "By creating these categories and using ISYS to filter the information to the appropriate user group, we could provide individuals only with the information they needed to do their jobs. We simultaneously eliminated the notion of making our users scroll through an endless amount of text that doesn't pertain to their roles. Plus, we could set access controls that ensured protected information was viewed only by those needing to know."

Measuring success

Productivity benefits derived from moving from a manual to an automated process are apparent enough, but what is the actual bottom-line value? According to Von Fange, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona conducted a test analysis of its return on investment for ISYS.

Using a representative document set that included various codes and descriptions, Von Fange's team calculated a productivity savings of 67 percent. This resulted in a total dollar savings of $200,000 a year in terms of productivity, paper costs and update costs. Multiplied out across the company's entire index, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona has realized real value using ISYS. And as Von Fange will tell you, ISYS stands as an obvious alternative to the organization's previous approach.

"If we didn't have this product, we would still be running paper copies, distributing them throughout the corporation, hoping that they were received and updated in each user's manual, which is a costly process."