How Adaptavist helped Collective Health empower people and processes
Collective Health is on a mission to make healthcare work for everyone. To do this successfully, they needed a cutting-edge technology solution to manage and optimise member data and deliver a compelling user experience.
Requirements at a glance
- A complete solution for managing member queries, requests, and questions
- Capability to deliver an industry-leading experience for members (customers)
- Ability to scale and manage a rapidly growing member base
- Framework to streamline workflows, processes and management of data to meet regulatory and privacy requirements
- Abundance of analytics and metrics to help, track, and measure performance
The solution: Adaptavist Managed Services
A dynamic, efficient and secure system for managing member data and delivering and unrivalled member experience. Find out more about Adaptavist Managed Services.
Results at a glance
Unlimited access to Atlassian experts from concept to execution Highly-automated, compliance and regulatory-friendly solution Custom-fit solution to deliver a competitive edge Comprehensive reporting capabilities for increased visibility and transparency A trusted and future-proof technology partnership
The customer
Collective Health gives companies a smarter way to provide healthcare coverage through technology and design. By creating the world’s first integrated health management solution, the Collective Health Platform, they’re helping employers optimise their investment in healthcare, and at the same time, take better care of their people.
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Collective Health has grown from strength to strength, now with over 200,000 members and over 45 enterprise clients, including Pinterest, Red Bull, and Zendesk.
The challenge
In 2015, Collective Health needed an efficient technology solution to manage the complex flow of information shared between its Member Advocates and Members (customers). To empower their Member Advocates to deliver the best customer experience possible, they needed a system that would eliminate duplication of customer data, and ensure the retrieval of that data was fast, accurate and highly automated. At this point the company had around 100 active members (customers) which was expected to grow to around 30,000 by January 2016.
Collective Health had a vision of what it needed but not a clear view of how to get there. Initially Adaptavist’s team spent time working alongside Collective Health’s team in California, gathering requirements and shaping their understanding of what was required.
Deeper conversations followed about the right direction to take, and to explore in detail how Atlassian’s Confluence and Jira tools could be used to meet their needs. “As we started pushing it,” says Preston, “we found the right balance between what we were trying to accomplish and how best to use the tools.”
"We needed a technology solution that would scale with us, and we needed it quickly."
The solution
From the outset, Preston was confident Jira was the right tool for the job. “We didn’t know exactly where we were going,” he says, “so Jira was a good choice because it’s highly configurable and customisable.” Given the tight timescales and degree of customisation required, the team realised they would need support from an Atlassian specialist to transform Jira to meet their needs.
After researching leading Atlassian Platinum experts in the market and being familiar with Adaptavist’s reputation through using our app add-ons, Preston got in touch and invited us to meet the Collective Health team in California.
Building the solution The first phase of the project involved implementing an information architecture and knowledge management framework for Collective Health using Confluence. The Adaptavist team provided recommendations on how they could organise data as efficiently as possible and how to reutilise it in various contexts. Adaptavist also worked on enhancing their data search capabilities using custom development in Confluence.
Requirements analysis As Jira was already being used for internal development work at Collective Heath, the team knew it would also be a good fit for the Member Advocates team. Adaptavist carried out analysis of Collective Health’s requirements, mapping workflows to accommodate existing processes, customer interactions, and internal and state-mandated Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Adaptavist introduced Jira Service Desk to manage Collective Health’s service levels and queue handling.
As the requirements became increasingly complex, Adaptavist brought ScriptRunner into the picture to manage the interface between all Collective Health’s different systems. For instance, ScriptRunner was used to automate a transition when a comment is addressed to a Member Advocate. Adaptavist also created an add-on to enhance Jira auditing for Collective Health, enabling visibility into who views specific issues.
Jira Enterprise Message Handler Jira Enterprise Message Handler (JEMH) was also integrated to handle both incoming and outgoing emails. For incoming emails, JEMH needs to pick up a variety of different information, map it to different issue types and custom fields, and potentially transition a workflow. For outgoing email, JEMH acknowledges an initial customer contact; turns outgoing Member Advocate comments into emails; and issues a survey when tickets are closed. Integrating JEMH helped Collective Health achieve its key goal of delivering an excellent, accurate, and timely customer experience, every time.
Meeting regulatory and customer requirements As an organisation, Collective Health must comply with US regulatory requirements around Protected Health Information (PHI). It’s also keen to ensure member’s private health information is secure and sensitively handled.
Permission inheritance ensures that access to protected health information is limited to the period when a ticket is open, adds Irene Tollinger, Collective Health’s Director of Program Management.
"We were trying to do it not just in a basic way which you can do with adding watchers, or having manually set permissions. We wanted to make it really efficient both for the operational teams and the engineers. What Adaptavist implemented is the ability to automatically give permission until the engineering ticket closes and then revoke the access, so it’s dynamic which saves time and we’re cleaning data as we go so it’s both efficient and secure."
Finally, in the health benefits sector, a member query can take many weeks or months to be resolved, and in the process accumulates around 50 to 60 comments. Collective Health wanted to ensure that a member query would never get lost in the system and they would never unintentionally drop the ball.
To be confident no member query would fall through the cracks, Adaptavist factored in a process for logging queries, reporting bugs and errors, as well as a framework to manage ticket queues, alerts for escalations, partner referrals, internal bug reporting and appeals.
The result
Collective Health’s new streamlined system for managing member queries was released to 30,000 customers on January 1st 2016. Following implementation, call volumes immediately increased, but with the new system in place Member Advocates are notified the moment a new query enters the queue, and data is never lost.
Clear visibility Member Advocates now have clear visibility and confidence in what they need to do. Their workload is managed more effectively so team members can stay focused without being overwhelmed by call volume. The data coming into Jira is clean because the system is careful not to overburden the metrics-gathering process.
Flexible approach to delivery Throughout the engagement, Collective Health praised Adaptavist’s flexible and open approach to delivery. “Especially as you started drilling down into the complexities of our space,” notes Preston, “the willingness to put aside assumptions about how best to use Jira and Confluence and revisit that with our specific needs in mind was very positive.”
Efficient approach to development Last but not least, Adaptavist has helped Collective Health work more efficiently. Preston comments, “The question is raised, ‘Why don’t we get a Jira engineer in-house?’ But you guys have such expertise in Atlassian products, and can build with such clarity, that it’s much more efficient to work with your experts than for us to try and build that expertise in depth ourselves. Your knowledge just makes our development process much more efficient.”
“As a team,” concludes Preston, “we are working together very well and are excited to see where this can go.”
"We were very much looking for that holistic picture back from your team, and the value of working with you guys is you helped configure a tool that makes it very easy for our people. The tools support them in being as efficient as possible.” Irene Tollinger, Collective Health's Director of Program Management"
About Adaptavist
Adaptavist, established in 2005, is a London-headquartered IT services company providing premium professional services, support, hosting and licensed products to a wide range of national and international clients including over half of the Fortune 500 companies. Adaptavist, an ‘Atlassian Platinum and Enterprise Partner’, is widely recognised as the most technically advanced Enterprise Partner in the Atlassian ecosystem.
Contact us
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