BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Quickly Moves Legacy to the Web

BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina (BCBSSC) offers healthcare insurance to the individuals, families and businesses of South Carolina. The company serves more than one million South Carolinians.

Largely due to the growth of their government programs, BCBSSC has more than 8,000 employees with offices throughout South Carolina, as well as in Virginia and Florida. BCBSSC consistently ranks as one of the top BlueCross plans in the nation and is continually researching new products to increase efforts to offer South Carolinians secure, cost-efficient healthcare coverage.

BCBSSC needed a web presence to stay competitive with other healthcare providers. The company was already using DataDirect products to generate more modern Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) for mission-critical in-house data systems, however BCBSSC also wanted to make that information available to the general public via the Internet.

Provider Directory, BCBSSC's network of participating doctors, was the first process moved to the Web. With Healthcare Finder the in-house program already in place, customers who wanted to find information about a doctor had to first place a call to BCBSSC, and then a BCBSSC employee would need to locate the information on the system, relaying the information back via telephone.

Using ClientBuilder, BCBSSC rapidly linked Healthcare Finder to the Web site so that customers with Internet access could search for doctors on their network by specialty or by location. Customers were no longer restricted to calling for provider information during BCBSSC's business hours - they could surf the Web looking for doctors on the BCBSSC Web site whenever it was convenient for them.

Once Provider Directory went live, BCBSSC moved on to other deliverables. The company now allows Member, Provider, Benefit Coordinator and Agent access to secured functionality such as Eligibility Status, Benefit Booklets, Deductible and Out of Pocket Status, Authorization Status, Claim Status, Bill Status, Primary Care Changes and ID Card requests.

In addition to staying on top of the competition in terms of establishing their own Web presence, BCBSSC anticipates significant time and cost savings as a result of the ClientBuilder implementations.

"The establishment of our online functions greatly diminishes the number of calls coming in-house," said Castro. "Fewer people manning the phones leads to major cost savings for the company. With the DataDirect application, we still have only one set of software to maintain, but we can use it both internally (in-house) and externally (on the Web)."

Castro added, "The nature of our business forces us to continually look at different products to make sure we are on the leading edge of technology, and none have compared to DataDirect's quality and ease-of-use. DataDirect's solutions have been a very effective tool for us."