BCBS of SC’s Wiggins Leverages Past Investments for Current Success

Elite 8 honoree Stephen K. Wiggins, CIO and EVP at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Carolina, credits several past technology investments, such as those involving parallel computing and code generation, for some recent successes.

Over the 29 years that Stephen K. Wiggins has been with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Carolina, a myriad of factors have contributed to the success of the carrier's IT operation. Almost certainly, though, a series of forward-thinking decisions by Wiggins and other members of the IT team made during the 1980s helped position the Columbia, S.C.-based carrier for future accomplishments.

As a result of some of those early choices, Wiggins — who became the carrier's CIO in 1994 and added EVP to his title in April 2007 — has helped develop BCBS of South Carolina's (more than 1 million members) IT group into a top-notch organization that supports not only its own business but other businesses as well. For example, the carrier developed a single core platform to support Companion Data Services (CDS), a BCBS of South Carolina subsidiary that provides IT services to the Medicare program, as well as various business partners. It also leverages the impressive capacities of its data centers to support other private insurers, in addition to its own health insurance business, not to mention Medicaid, TRICARE (the U.S. military's benefit system) and other federal programs.

This year Wiggins oversaw the transition of 1-800-MEDICARE's national data warehouse into the carrier's data center. According to Wiggins, BCBS of South Carolina's Unix-based Oracle (Redwood City, Calif.) system analyzes several terabytes of workload statistics for the national telephone help line. In total, he estimates, his 2,300-employee group processes 662 million healthcare claims and $7.9 billion in online transactions each year.

Ahead of the Curve

In the mid-1980s, when Wiggins was an assistant VP of systems and programming at BCBS of South Carolina, he explains, the IT organization made choices with the future in mind. For instance, the IT team chose to develop applications under the assumption that, eventually, computers would be able to process in parallel.

"We believed that, at some point, computers would be able to parallel process for business, and so, when we designed our systems, we designed them to run in parallel," Wiggins recalls. "That's basically how we process today and why we can process so many claims. We literally can run as many parallel processes as we need, but it's of the same code."

Around that same time, the company designed its databases so they could be viewed by the carrier's systems as a single large database. "We came up with a design concept where, even though physical databases have physical limits, the systems see the databases as one giant database," Wiggins explains. "So we have unlimited storage capability because of how the system views that."

The benefits of those early choices are still being enjoyed today. First and foremost, Wiggins says, the carrier essentially runs on one core system. "We have a highly specialized set of applications that have been developed over years, and so we really have a single platform that supports our various customers, at least in our commercial world. Our dental, vision, health, managed care and consumer-directed products all run on a single system," he relates.