Case Study: WPS Health Solutions – A digital experience journey

WPS Health Solutions (WPS) is Wisconsin’s leading not-for-profit health insurer, offering affordable individual health insurance, family health insurance, and high-deductible health plans, as well as flexible and affordable group health plans and cost-effective benefit plan administration for businesses. The expertise WPS has developed over the years has enabled the company to become a successful provider of administrative services for the U.S. government. WPS Government Health Administrators manages Medicare Part A and Part B benefits for millions of seniors in multiple states, and WPS Military and Veterans Health serves millions of members of the U.S. military and their families through TRICARE and Veterans Administration programs.

WPS Military and Veterans Health (MVH) launched a major program to transform four beneficiary and provider web channels beginning with the introduction of a new provider portal in the spring of 2014. Although the MVH team had selected an industry leading portal and web content management system, the new solution had a number of challenges;

• Making simple content updates was complex, time-consuming and usually required additional involvement from the IT team
• Applying product updates was a source of frustration for the WPS team
• Performance, at times, was unacceptable

The WPS MVH team called a timeout to assess if they wanted to continue with the current solution and evaluated several implementation firms to help them move forward on their portal journey. After careful consideration, WPS selected Base22 to implement two successful beneficiary portals during 2015. The new beneficiary portals utilize Base22’s enterprise portal blueprint which includes a set of design assets and proven implementation patterns.

The solution has changed the way WPS interacts with its customers. Instead of customers having to look for the information they need, WPS staff can now push relevant content to customers. “Now we’re pushing the data out to the user, rather than having them have to search for anything,” said Dave True, WPS Program Director. Customers have been so delighted with the new digital experience that they’ve been calling simply to thank the company for the new solution.

The new solution has given business users the power to update content on their own, eliminating a bottleneck between business and IT. “Business users can actually publish content daily to beneficiaries,” said True. “The solution gives us a lot more flexibility to get information out faster.”  In the past, because the publishing process was so cumbersome, WPS would publish new information to users about once every six months. Within the first month of having the new solution, WPS pushed out six new publications.

WPS is now better positioned to bid for new contracts and gain new business. “If we can write into a proposal about things that we’re doing better than the competition, then we’re at an advantage in the bidding process,” said True.

With the successful implementation of the beneficiary portals in 2015, the WPS MVH team commissioned Base22 to redesign and implement two new provider portals in 2016 including replacing the first provider portal which had caused so much heartburn.

In less than two years, WPS Military and Veterans Health has transformed their digital experience for all beneficiaries and providers. The benefits for beneficiaries and providers are:

• Clean, modern, easy-to-use and responsive experience
• Content and services delivered to any device, any time, appropriately displayed for the device’s form factor
• Well-organized, logical information architecture designed around how beneficiaries and providers want to access information and services including a   much improved claims experience
• Content and services targeted to each user role based on their user profile information and language selection.
• Improved search
• Consistent, predictable overall site performance

The benefits for the WPS Military and Veterans Health team:

• More control in the hands of the business stakeholders with reduced dependence on IT
• Ability to easily target content and services to specific users and communities
• Ability to implement front-end design and content changes outside of regular IT deployments
• Ability to leverage design patterns and assets for future projects and accelerate delivery of new functionality
• User-friendly documentation of site functionality, maintainable and re-usable for future projects
• Ability to report usage by user profile across the website based on available user information

Award Winning

WPS Health Solutions received two eHealthcare Leadership Awards in 2016 for their new solution.

Best Site Design. This category includes attractive and engaging user experience design. Does the design facilitate access to key site information? Does it    provide strong branding and excellent usability?

Best Patient Access & Convenience. This category covers appointment requests and scheduling, ER wait times, patient test results, bill pay, patient-physician communications, directions, classes/events, and service preregistration. Patient portals included.

The Digital Experience Journey Continues

With the WPS Military and Veterans Health team leading the way, WPS Health Solutions has now established a set of enterprise standards for their digital experience initiatives across all lines of business allowing the entire organization to leverage:

• A common hardware and software infrastructure
• A user experience model that leverages shared design and implementation patterns
• A core set of IT skills that can be utilized across all lines of business

For More Information

For more information on this case study, please contact Luis Lozano, luis.lozano@base22.com