Lori Beer Drives IT to the Next Level at Post-Merger WellPoint

Lori Beer's tenure as CTO of WellPoint in the wake of the Anthem merger has helped position her to drive significant change as CIO and take the carrier's IT organization to the next level.

According to Beer, attention to the varying demands of the business areas led to a major departure within the North Star Strategy from WellPoint's previous plans for consolidation of its core claims systems. While Beer has advanced work on the carrier's main platform, its internally built Enterprise Transaction System (ETS), it will not be the single system earlier envisioned. "We ultimately decided on a three-system strategy: one for the core of our business -- individual and group -- one to address the complexities of our heavily customized national accounts business, and a third for Medicare business that requires a significant amount of regulatory compliance."

WellPoint will use its NASCO (Atlanta) system for national accounts and TriZetto's (Newport Beach, Calif.) Facets system for its Medicare business, Beer reports.

Standardized Data Assets

Such adjustments, however, do not signal a compromise on the goal of unified data capabilities, Beer insists. She says she sees the challenge of uniting data from different claims systems as a "microcosm" of the problems faced by the industry in general. Her choice of words is anything but grandiose, given that WellPoint's data assets cover 34 million individuals. To meet the goal of supporting better healthcare for members, Beer notes, it is critical to be able to access all relevant data about a given customer in order to drive a variety of services, such as behavior or treatment recommendations and alerts.

To address that challenge, Beer has partnered with WellPoint's business leaders, who are regarded as the stewards of data within their areas, to deliver an enterprise data warehouse with 3,000 data elements with consistent definitions across the enterprise. "We're pulling together 24 different data warehouses," Beer remarks. "And across a simple [data] value such as 'state,' there were a couple hundred definitions and codes, even though there are only 50 states."

Beer's information management initiative also calls for critical systems to update the environment within 24 hours; in the past, the process of feeding data through other data systems resulted in an information lag of about 30 days, she relates. "Timeliness and quality are as important as the definition of the data itself," Beer asserts. "Having this strategic asset for 34 million people across the enterprise will be a huge enabler to drive business decisions, support providers for things like e-prescribing and drive health IT initiatives that are dependent on this information."

Beer also has advanced WellPoint's technology architecture, transitioning from WellPoint's and Anthem's "dabbling" in SOA to a mature state involving not only a rational long-term plan but actual benefits, including a savings of approximately $2 million over the past year owing to reuse. "The key thing we learned as part of making this fully operational is that you couldn't just 'build a service and they would come,' " Beer quips. "We had to establish governance processes, we had to think about testing differently and we had to put new disciplines around the software development process."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio