LOREN KOERBER: Hi, Paula. Nice to see you. For those that are jumping into our series for the first time, please check out our other podcast called Payer, Technology, and Market Expansion, to hear the first part of our conversation. And from talking with some of you in the market, I know our payer clients are experiencing challenges from reducing manual claims processing, high FTE numbers, and to reducing operational costs. One imperative must have is an integrated business and technology to tackle these challenges. Now, Paula, do you agree, and what are some of the challenges you've seen?
PAULA GALLO: You're right, Loren. Systems must be easy to use and more integrated. Another challenge is a lack of business agility and capacity. And so what I mean by that is tech teams are usually pretty agile savvy. The problem is the business partners are not as mature, so translating those requirements from business so that they can be consumed by tech partners, can be a barrier. Another challenge is when a health plan presses go before they're actually ready. So that pre-planning phase is pretty important and assigning resources is necessary. And really understanding the real work that needs to get done is pretty critical.
LOREN KOERBER: So let's talk about the real work. You mentioned in the last podcast, payers should be adopting new capabilities and consolidating platforms, or migrating legacy platforms in order to achieve those growth goals. So is all of this a heavy lift?
PAULA GALLO: It can be a heavy lift. So a health plan needs to consider, do I pull my resources from other responsibilities and projects to support the migration or do I find experts who have the experience and knowledge to support our needs? With successful growth comes the need to become more agile, more consistent, in order to launch new products quickly and meet regulatory requirements. So we recently had a customer wanting to enter the ACA market with a tight timeline to enter this new market segment. So we collaborated with their business partners to do the research and document the regulatory requirements. Then we took the requirements and bumped it up against their current business capabilities to identify the gaps in areas of support. And then we looked at the underlying technology enabling those business capabilities to assess the impact of change. From that, we worked with the business partners to make a plan for new capabilities that needed to be developed.
LOREN KOERBER: So are you minimizing some of the rework for the health plan?
PAULA GALLO: Yes, absolutely. We were the go between with business teams and the tech teams to get the capabilities and features to ready and in the backlog for development. So our position between these two teams helped expedite the process and translation, which ultimately minimized mis requirements and rework. So determining what needs to be modified, retired, or changed, it's important to do that up front and that's where we can help.
LOREN KOERBER: I think some of the challenges we spoke about in our last podcast really resonated with our peers. And if you didn't catch it, check out our Around The Corner Series to listen. And Paula, next time, let's talk about how our clients are finding the value.
PAULA GALLO: Sounds great, Loren. Thank you.
