Tag: healthcare reform

UHG-Aetna and Anthem-Cigna Merger Rumor Mills May Give IT Service Providers Goose Bumps | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Rumor mills are buzzing over the potential acquisition approaches made by suitors United Health and Anthem for Aetna and Cigna, respectively. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the growing focus on consolidation to drive health insurance premium/cost rationalization have led to these tactical maneuvers. While the equity analysts and investment banks have already started to split hairs on the potential implications for capital markets and stocks, our focus here is on the implications these mergers may have on the IT/BPO services market.

These four companies – Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, and UnitedHealth – are star accounts for some of the largest IT service providers that focus on the payer industry. Some service providers have so much revenue exposure to these accounts that their healthcare revenues can take a hit of over 200 basis points, simply as a consequence of IT budget realignments or vendor consolidation.

Impact on IT services

These potential mergers may lead to the following key transformational IT implications:

  • Systems and applications integration: Merging organizations reduce redundancy by retiring transactional systems and applications, and opting for integrated systems that can work across the merging entities. The biggest impact will likely be on claims, members, and product rationalization initiatives
  • Database and datawarehouse consolidation: This is one of the biggest imminent implications, as some of these organizations (especially Anthem) have gone through a decade long initiative to create an enterprise view of organizational data. Going through another round of database integration will be an imperative hard to push to a future date
  • Infrastructure rationalization: These are huge capital assets, and mergers often present an opportunity to divest some of these assets in favor of cloud-based (most likely private) services
  • Vendor rationalization: There are likely to be significant vendor redundancies, given that most of these organizations have mature vendor portfolios.

Implications for service providers

  • The most likely beneficiaries of these mergers will be service providers that have systems experience across both the acquiring and target entities, as this will help with any integration initiative
  • The second most likely beneficiaries will be service providers that are strongly entrenched in one of the entities and have indispensable systemic knowledge. However, given the potential hazard of these systems being retired as part of redundancy rationalization initiatives, these entrenchments can also be huge risks for these service providers
  • Competitive presence will also be a key differentiator. Service providers with smaller visibility into these accounts may find their portfolios being overtaken by competitors with wider system coverage and presence in these accounts. Organizations today do not fear putting all their eggs in one basket. In fact, they rely a lot on service partners that will not only share their risk but also be strong partners in their transitional initiatives.

The following image illustrates the current exposure of key service providers in these four entities. As you see, these mergers may be beneficial for most of these large service providers. However, a few, such as Infosys in UHG-Aetna, CGI in Anthem-Cigna, and IBM in both UHG-Aetna and Anthem-Cigna, may have at-risk portfolios given competitive underpinnings and systemic maturity of the acquirers.

We’ll be reporting our views on this story as it unfolds, so keep watching this space.

UHG Aetna Anthem Cigna Account-level Exposure of Key Service Providers

BPO: Healthcare Payers’ Swiss Army Knife | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

The healthcare payer market continues to experience rapid transformation as efforts to control costs, minimize waste, and root out fraud and abuse collide with the effects of an aging population, the burgeoning insured population brought on by the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and advances in technology and medicine. Taken alone, any one of these events would have significant impact on healthcare payers; together they’re nothing short of revolutionary.

Faced with such transformation, healthcare insurers are seeking strategies that can help them to manage ever-increasing demands. Among the more impactful tools they can employ is business process outsourcing (BPO). The healthcare payer BPO market, currently estimated at about US$4 billion, is growing at a healthy 14 percent annually. And it’s no surprise, as BPO is more important than ever in helping healthcare payers to streamline their operations and reduce costs. Beyond the basics, BPO can also help providers to research, develop and launch new products; to glean value from the masses of data they capture; and, to identify and reduce cases of fraud, waste, and abuse.

And there appears to be some evidence that payers are tapping into the power of BPO to help address their most significant challenges. While claims processing remains the most commonly outsourced BPO process, other more strategic areas are driving overall growth:

HC Payer BPO SPL 2015 I3

  • Product development & business acquisition (PDBA) – though the smallest segment of all outsourced healthcare payer BPO market, PDBA grew the most, at about 50 percent, between 2012 and 2013. The implementation of PPACA has forced payers to come up with new plans that are comparable to others and easy for members to understand, driving significant activity in this area
  • Member management – increasing by about 35-40 percent from 2012 to 2013, member management is another fast-growth BPO trend being fueled by PPACA. The Act is driving payers’ need not only to manage more, and increasingly diverse members, but also to take advantage of the vast amounts of data generated by the growing insured population
  • Provider management – changes in the healthcare environment are compelling payers to collaborate more with healthcare providers, in turn driving a need for better provider management. The result is that outsourcing in this area grew at about 35-40 percent year-over-year
  • Care management – As payers increase their direct contact with patients, and as part of their attempts to manage costs, healthcare payers are increasingly getting involved in care management activities, driving growth in the area to about 30-35 percent in one year

The changes in the healthcare market are daunting for even the most prepared and best funded healthcare payers. In order to compete in the increasingly challenging and competitive market, payers have to take advantage of every tool available, and BPO is fast becoming the industry’s Swiss Army Knife.

For more insights on the healthcare BPO market, see our just released report, Healthcare Payer BPO – State of market with PEAK Matrix™ Assessment. Log in or register to download a complimentary preview.


Photo credit: Flickr

Health Insurers Grappling with the New Dawn | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

If you’re a stakeholder – any stakeholder – in the United States’ healthcare system, the data in the following charts is troubling and flummoxing.

The U.S. Healthcare System Paradox

 

 

Although the country’s outlay on healthcare (as a share of GDP and per capita) substantially exceeds that of other developed countries, it ranks behind most nations on many measures of health outcomes, quality, and efficiency. In fact, a June 2014 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. dead last on most performance dimensions – e.g., access, efficiency, and quality – when compared against 10 other developed countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom).

Winds of Change

The health insurance space in the U.S. is undergoing a radical transformation driven by regulatory changes and consumerization of demand. So it is not surprising that the current focus of the massive reform underway in the country focuses on cost rationalization and efficiency enhancement.

Health Insurance Themes

Reforms (primarily rising from the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare) are reshaping health plans’ operating model. The onset of a value-based reimbursement model (moving from “defined benefits” to “defined contribution”) raises fundamental questions about current business paradigms. The impetus provided to Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and the blurring lines between payers and providers are leading to a fundamental realignment of incentives, ownership, and priorities. Obamacare and ICD-10 have had a sizable impact on payers’ technology portfolios as they look to leverage next-generation IT and modernize legacy platforms.

Payers are embracing the challenge of consumerization as their customers take increasing ownership of health outcomes, signaling the shift from large national accounts to the individual segments. This directly impacts their sales, outreach, and member engagement channels and methodologies. There is a renewed focus on approaching traditional buyer segments through non-traditional channels, primarily Health Insurance Exchanges (HIX) and direct engagement. These wide-sweeping changes are leading to a rethink of current systems, processes, interfaces, and vendors.

Payers Looking Ahead

Reform mandates key driver in healthcare ITO deals

Payers are marrying reform-driven changes with their overall technology portfolio in an effort to pivot from a primarily B2B business to a B2C model. These regulatory changes call for increased systems integration efforts, establishment of public portals, customer outreach, remediation, testing, and revenue cycle program management.

Healthcare reforms, a dynamic regulatory landscape, and consumerization of demand are transforming the healthcare industry. Payers need to understand, assess, and be proactive in navigating these choppy waters.

For further insight, check out our recent publication,  “IT Outsourcing (ITO) in the Payer Industry – Annual Report 2014: Regulations on Payers’ Mind.” This report provides an overview of the ITO market for the payer industry. Analysis includes market size and growth, forecasts (up to 2020), demand drivers, adoption and scope trends, key areas of investment, and implications for buyers and service providers.

New York’s Plan for Medicaid Services — and Why It Matters | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

A movement is underway in the state of New York that, if successful, could result in a seismic shake-up in the U.S. healthcare industry. In a contract now under bid for developing a new program for processing Medicaid claims, New York will shift to paying for Medicaid on a managed-care basis rather than the current system of paying by procedure. The risks are high for both the state and its selected service provider, but so are the opportunities for the first movers to capture a large market throughout the country.

Why the change in pricing structure?

Basically New York wants to pay by service. They want to pay healthcare providers (doctors and hospitals) to treat a patient for an ailment but don’t want to pay for all the different procedures that go into that. The state’s goal in changing the structure is to give providers incentives to work with their patients efficiently against the goal of curing them, rather than maximizing their revenue by doing more procedures.

It’s a lofty goal that shows great promise. We can all agree that incentives matter and curing more people at a lower price is a wonderful thing. But there are consequences that accompany this goal.

The consequences are big

The backbone of the Medicaid system is a transactional billing process and platforms for paying by procedure. Achieving New York’s goal will require changing Medicaid’s underlying computer systems and operations of Medicaid. It’s well worth doing, but it’s a big issue.

The stakes are high

New York is one of the first to come to market for changing the payment structure, and the stakes are very high. As we saw with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), big rewrites of healthcare platforms are risky, expensive and painful. New York’s plan is no less risky, expensive and painful in that it deals with a substantial part of the U.S. economy and the services cover the poorest of the poor — an important set of stakeholders that we don’t want to disenfranchise.

The risks are also high for the service providers that win the contract to work with the state to develop the new structure. Hopefully New York learned from the lessons of implementing the Affordable Care Act and will spend adequate time defining the requirements and selecting the appropriate service providers and will also create flexibility for the providers as they move down the journey of discovery to build these new platforms. The requirements will emerge as they start working on the problem, making the traditional waterfall process of government contracting difficult.

The stakes are also high for the healthcare providers, who don’t wish to be in the cross-hairs of public scrutiny as the early adopters of the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act.

The benefits are substantial

Despite the high risks, the benefits are equally high. A restructured payment system promises better patient outcomes, greater efficiency for the state, and an improved healthcare industry. And the first mover that successfully builds this platform will be well positioned to capture a very large market and resell it to the other 49 states.

It’s a risky, high-stakes game. But they have all to play for.

How can we engage?

Please let us know how we can help you on your journey.

Contact Us

"*" indicates required fields

Please review our Privacy Notice and check the box below to consent to the use of Personal Data that you provide.