Partnership in Action

In today’s ever-challenging market, with increasing competition and emerging pressures, Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans must find new ways to deliver value to their customers. That’s where USAble Life comes in: When customers require innovative, new solutions, we develop tailored ancillary strategies to help our Blue partners win and retain business. Our deep connections deliver lasting results.

The Challenge

Because of our close relationship with our Blue partners, we frequently collaborate on new ways to deliver value to their customers. In this particular case, we worked together to identify new opportunities to enhance a customer’s benefits offering for its members to make their benefits work better for them.

Our first step was to initiate a collaborative product design process to identify and provide ancillary strategies that solved the member’s needs.

The Plan

• Framing the challenge: Our shared focus was to use ancillary strategies to demonstrate that our Blue Cross and Blue Shield partner was finding new ways to make insurance work better for its members.
• Streamlining the experience: We looked into key moments in the individual member’s ancillary products experience — from benefit selection to claims submission to renewal — to find opportunities for improvement.
  • We collaboratively identified potential weak spots in this experience and focused on ways that our partnership could uniquely solve any issues. We discovered a problem with all ancillary products and solved it for ours — claims submission and complexity.
  • We recognized that when members have the most need to use their supplemental products is the moment when they count on their insurance to deliver — but the experience we studied was complicated for the members. It required retrieving and filing paperwork, collecting physician and employee statements, verifying employment, and other hurdles that required time and effort before delivering what members needed most — their benefit.
• Designing new solutions: By examining the process in this critical moment, we were able to find ways to create increased efficiency between medical claims and supplemental benefit payments and uniquely simplify the member experience.
  • We designed and prototyped a new operational process that allowed for the ability to pay ancillary claims from medical claims data. The result is a process that is mostly automated, with most claims paid without members having to make any extra effort.
• Testing for viability and feasibility: We worked with our Blue partner to ensure that this product would be attractive to members, as well as viable and feasible. We conducted custom research to gauge benefit buyer desirability and broker acceptance and learned that brokers and groups are interested in this product offering.

A Successful Outcome

We launched the first-of-its-kind integrated supplemental product for this group and the product delivered. We saw most claims paid automatically without a claim form or employer or physician statement.

And importantly, we delivered on our stated objective: Helping our Blue partner deploy new, exciting solutions that drive member satisfaction and deliver on the promise of being there when our customers need us most.

What can our partnership do for you? Let’s start a conversation.