WPA - LEADING HEALTH INSURER

OUR CLIENT

A leading health insurer with a track record of delivering innovative services

Founded in 1901 WPA remains true to the principle of making healthcare affordable for hundreds and thousands of people, through its family policies and corporate schemes.

They offer groundbreaking personal and business health insurance policies that have truly revolutionised healthcare in the UK. From funding cancer drugs not readily available on the NHS, the first benefit of its kind, to being recognised by the World Health Organisation as leading in the development of new policies that reduce costs for its members.

The healthcare insurance market is highly competitive and the need for innovation in all aspects of the service is a key success driver.

WPA has innovation in its DNA and works hard to ensure it delivers new solutions to both its business and personal customers’.

Historically WPA has used bespoke technology solutions to help set it apart from its competitors and it continues to look for ways to create competitive advantage through new technology-driven service improvements.

BUSINESS NEEDS

A self-service customer portal providing deep data analysis capabilities

WPA works hard to stay ahead of its competition by anticipating emerging customer’s needs.

Seeing an increase in demand for data analysis, forecasting, and benefits analysis by its customers’ WPA wanted to get ahead of this emerging customer demand and prove that it continued to evolve as its customers’ needs evolved.

As customer demand for bespoke reports was increasing WPA could see that a self-service digital web-application would not only meet its customers’ needs but would streamline its internal operations offering it internal and external benefits and reinforcing its reputation for innovation.

Previously customers’ had come directly to a specific department to request the information they needed and as demand grew and the WPA customer-base grew this was not a sustainable position in the long-term.  The internal department used a commercial off the shelf (COTS) package, but the increasing costs and time required to configure the application meant that the application was not responsive enough to meet WPAs specific needs.

OUR SOLUTION

A multi-dimensional database-driven self-service portal

Employing our Agile development lifecycle process supported by our collaborative relationship management layer we built a bespoke team to deliver the project created from UK and Moldovan resources.  Combining Business Analysts, back-end and front-end Developers and with both manual and automated testing, all led by an experienced Delivery Lead the project quickly took shape.

Understanding that WPA needed not just a solution for now but also for the future (with a significant increase in data analysis being forecast) we built a multi-dimensional database solution that fed the web-application.  Not only did this future-proof the solution it also enabled WPA to prepare data for future interrogation and to be ready to respond to future customer requirements at a rapid pace.

As the bespoke web-application was designed to deliver on both customer experience and reinforce the brand proposition it was important to ensure the user-interface was as elegant as the data analytics aspects of the project.  To ensure elegance in design our in-house design experts created bespoke page and report designs providing multiple options for the customer to test with customers’.

For elegance in the database solution, we coded the core solution using a OLAP approach to allows users to analyse information from multiple database systems at one time.  This enabled users to truly interrogate their data at a level the COTS solution could not match. Version 1 of the web-application was launched on time and on budget.

OUR PROCESS

Using the Amdaris Way of combining the best people with the best processes we began by taking the clients’ vision and provisional requirements and analysing them in detail so we could understand the users, their needs and ensure we discovered everything we needed to know to build the right application.

In our Discovery phase, we combined business analysis, user experience, and user interface skills to architect the optimum solution.  We spent time in the client offices to get a deep understanding of their business and the client spent time with the development team in Moldova as a sign of their commitment to aligning their vision with our delivery capabilities.

We knew that this web-application had to take information from both database and data warehouse environments. It was required to present real-time analysis, projections, and interactive charts. This information then had to be displayed in an interface comparing the customer’s data with other companies or sectors.  The flexibility of the data visualisation elements was felt to be as important as the data manipulation elements.
We then moved on to building the web-application confident in the requirements and the acceptance criteria.

TECHNOLOGIES

THE OUTCOMES

With a successful deployment WPA saw instant results with corporate customers’ accessing the web-application from day one. Usage of the web-application increased rapidly as customers’ could see the value of the ability to use the data manipulation functionality to optimise their schemes to their specific needs.

As additional functionality was added, in phase 2, customers’ were then able to explore how their schemes might need to evolve overtime by modelling different scenarios.  Customers’ were able to explore usage patterns to understand the demand for each element of their healthcare scheme allowing them to remove unutilised coverage areas or predict likely increases in demand for future planning forecasting.

The switch from manual reporting to a more dynamic on-demand service significantly reduced the administrative burden for WPA staff.