Since long before the pandemic, consumers throughout the United States called for a more agile and flexible healthcare system. By responding to these calls, health insurers can transform America’s landscape of care while revolutionizing their contributions to healthcare delivery.
Platform modernization journeys enhance the efficacy of care delivery. By streamlining their platforms, insurers are able to embrace a more efficient and effective enterprise. Of course, such improvements have reduced costs for all – payers, providers, and patients.
But how is this achieved?
Concord’s Executive Director of Healthcare Strategy, John Murphey, has a strong understanding of the role platform modernization plays in helping health insurers better serve their communities. Throughout his career, Murphey has spanned everything from technical development to business operations leadership and large program management.
Murphey’s expertise provides great perspective into how platform modernization is crucial in any sort of digital transformation across industries, but especially for healthcare insurers. In other words, you can’t achieve a true digital transformation of your organization without platform modernization, and vice versa.
Platforms are comprised of a set of foundational services that ultimately enable your organization to create additional services and applications better and faster.
“While a healthcare payer’s platform is generally not a customer-facing tool, it’s necessary as the base for services and apps,” Murphey shares. Historically, however, platforms are built to support a specific service domain. In doing so, another important service is undercut. Usually this results in hastily building yet another service stack. Things can get messy quite fast.
Enter the beauty of platform modernization.
Platform modernization streamlines foundational services throughout your insurance platform. Two key-trends have marked the success of platform modernization, according to Murphey.
Centralizing Data. First, by migrating from private data centers to the cloud, greater thought has been given to the ways centralizing data allows health insurers to act more flexibly.
Defining Domains. Second, platform modernization has introduced the convenience brought on by building more consistent views across a platform through domains, like customer and client domains. Ultimately, domains mean more streamlined services.
Healthcare is a tricky terrain with constantly changing demands, so this kind of performance-elasticity and organization critically impacts how and what kind of care can be delivered at any given moment.
For example, when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was introduced in the US, health insurers had to quickly figure out how to reconcile their existing services with the ACA’s new conditions for health insurance. But legacy platforms for many health insurers fell short, accruing significant costs in their efforts to meet the demands of the ACA.
Your platform is only as good as its usability, especially in the constantly changing climate of healthcare. “Platform modernization increases the usability of your foundational services because it ensures their elastic-capacity,” says Murphey.
By having the flexibility to quickly manage new conditions for delivering care, health insurers can significantly reduce spending by having greater ability to manage their cost curves over time. Platform modernization encourages automation, as well, so development teams can devote their energy to building other solutions with more ease and efficiency.
What’s the best way to accelerate your journey? John shares five practical steps to implement right away:
The healthcare landscape is notoriously complex. Technology consultancies with deep industry expertise work hard to introduce services and tools that make your organization’s platform modernization a simpler process.
In this manner, Concord built an iterative approach to platform modernization that helps organizations see value at each stage of their modernization journey. Our technologists collaborate with experts to ensure the tech continually supports pressures faced by insurance providers. Download our Healthcare Payer Solutions, to improve every aspect of your business and deliver more effective, affordable healthcare.
Over time health insurers are able to maximize the usability of their platforms to better care for their communities. Improving healthcare costs for payers means improving access to care for communities.
Contact us today to learn more about the benefits of healthcare payer data analytics, our Technology Integration Services, and how we can help your business thrive.
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