Aspirus Arise: a new health plan’s public site, and a portal designed with members, employers, agents and providers

Aspirus Arise Health Plan of Wisconsin was formed in 2016 as a joint venture between WPS Health Insurance and Aspirus, a health system in north-central Wisconsin, and began operating that April. A new plan has to win its first members. The people comparing coverage, from someone buying an individual policy to a small business or a large employer, needed to understand the plans, find the one that fit and ask for a quote, on a site that met NCQA requirements and held up next to the best insurers online, including the new internet-based ones.

After enrollment the questions change. In our workshops we traced them end to end: a member facing a hip replacement wants to know whether insurance will cover it; the provider wants to know whether the patient is covered, whether the procedure needs prior authorization and how they will get paid; an employer’s HR team wants an accurate bill and a clear answer to who to call, and when. The answers sat in several back-office systems, and, as the provider workshop noted, many calls came from people not being sure where to find things.

Looking at the market first

In 2015–2016 we interviewed WPS stakeholders, reviewed the brand and customer surveys WPS and Arise already had, benchmarked competitors’ sites, including the new internet-based insurers, and created web and mobile visual concepts for WPS Health Insurance’s sites, Aspirus Arise included, in a clickable prototype.

A plan selector and a quote in a few steps

For the public site we ran workshops to agree on the structure, layout and information architecture, then built it on WPS’s existing IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager. A plan selector guides people to Individual, Small Group or Large Group plans, Get-a-Quote forms send each request into WPS’s sales process, and HSA and FSA calculators help people work out what they’d set aside.

One structure for several brands, in two languages

We designed a multi-brand content structure, so several brand sites share one information architecture and reuse the same news and resources, with content libraries in English and Spanish. Authors learned to use it in a recorded course and a set of how-to guides, and to write in one brand voice across the site.

A portal designed with the people who’d use it

In 2016–2017 we designed the portal one audience at a time: providers, agents, employers and members, each in workshops with the people who serve them, plus a quoting tool. The clickable prototype covered registration, dashboards, claims, eligibility, prior authorization, billing and quoting, and we walked through it with WPS’s experts and with outside users such as brokers and employers’ HR staff. They asked for clearer contact information and valued a “What would you like to do…” starting point, the claims view, the dashboard and out-of-pocket amounts. Every feature was then classed as must-have or nice-to-have.

A plan WPS’s engineers could build from

With WPS’s technical team we wrote a catalog of the web services each portal page needs, and a three-year roadmap in four-month releases: sales first (quoting, enrollment), then keeping members (self-service for agents, employers and members), then new ground (self-service for providers, cost transparency).

We delivered the Aspirus Arise public site on WPS’s existing portal platform: a plan selector, quote requests that go straight into WPS’s sales process, and a shared content structure that trained authors manage in English and Spanish across brand sites.

For the portal, WPS got a design already tested with brokers and employers rather than a slide deck: the clickable prototype, the prioritized features, the web-services catalog and the three-year roadmap. Our part was the research, the design, the public-site build and author training, and the portal’s design and roadmap.

Aspirus became the plan’s sole owner at the end of 2018, and the plan has been called Aspirus Health Plan since 2021.