“In God we trust; all others must bring data” – Blue Cross Blue Shield Invests in more Business Intelligence Software

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” W. Edwards Deming…it certainly seems to fit today. The software is there to “help the companies achieve their vision”, but by today’s standards, what are those visions and do they take into consideration humans? I am guessing from reading the article here that further collaboration on data between branches/offices and perhaps even patient data will be more accessible and afford the offices to make and project outcomes anticipated changes. Health Insurance lives by business intelligence, not by humans.

Here’s the vision of the consortium from the website, no mention of taking care of people though through better healthcare, it’s emphasis is strong market relationships…somewhat sounds like Wall Street to me.

“Consortium Health Plans will be a key enabler of Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans' continued strong growth in national accounts by providing market intelligence, strong market relationships and leading-edge sales tools.”

If you have never really seen some of the capabilities of what business intelligence software can provide it is astounding and you or me as a patient look like one big pie chart up on the computer screen as well as the traditional statistical data. All the complicated algorithms are also there to project what our future healthcare cost will be, but over the years information has been dirty to a degree so all of this may not be 100% correct. In this platform they are using some web 2.0 capabilities that also allows for synchronization at home level. Even though this is a less expensive way for them to do business, do you think premiums would reflect this, probably not.

The only defense one has with data is the personal health record as big conglomerates continue to tally up and add up the data they have on us, so if we don’t have our own, we suffer and are at the mercy of what they have on file and present. When cost goes up, they will be able to more quickly adjust the premiums in an upward fashion and compare regions all over the system in a few seconds. The mission of the consortium from the website, still sounds like Wall Street to me, the position appears to be the big focus, and one other item to think about, where’s the individual here, it appears this is geared towards major companies.

“The mission of Consortium Health Plans is to position Blue Cross Blue Shield as the carrier of choice for national accounts.”

Guess individual humans don’t account for much anymore…..BD

- Consortium Health Plans (the Consortium) is a national coalition of 39 regional and independently operated Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) Plans located across the United States. The Consortium provides national sales support to its members. This includes market intelligence and sales data that enable these regional health insurers to effectively collaborate and compete for national accounts.

-- The Consortium's legacy business intelligence (BI) platform was largely hand-coded and run on a data warehouse that had hit a performance ceiling. The system was difficult and expensive to maintain, and it could not adequately scale or adapt to new user requirements. The Consortium needed a BI solution that allowed members to quickly tailor sales efforts to changing market conditions while doing so at a lower cost.

-- Axis Group rapidly delivered a complete enterprise business intelligence solution that met the Consortium's business and budget requirements. Using the Kalido® Information Engine(TM) to automate many aspects of design and development, Axis Group re-architected Consortium's prior data warehouse into a new and more scalable data warehouse -- a core component of any BI solution -- in 30 days. The Consortium's Information Data Store 2.0 (IDS 2.0) went into production in November 2008. It manages data from five discrete external source system applications and is accessed by more than 100 users daily.