Premera Blue Cross, a health benefits company serving more than 1.6 million members primarily in the northwestern United States, is committed to improving its members’ health and to maintaining more sustainable costs. The company believes the key to success is education and collaboration with members, employers, physicians, hospitals, and the extended health care community, to encourage cost-conscious actions, improve medical quality, and support members at every stage of health. Due to the size and distributed nature of Premera’s business, timely and effective communication with its many external audiences, as well as its own staff, is easily one of the most business critical functions the company undertakes. The Web plays an important role in this process.

In 2002, Premera found managing its ever-growing public Web sites, portals, and intranet content to be an increasing challenge as the company quickly expanded. Specifically, manual publishing techniques created information technology (IT) bottlenecks leading to outdated information, as well as inconsistent branding and messaging across all of the company’s Web properties.

Additionally, Premera sought to improve its business processes by implementing Web-based workflow and version control capabilities. Premera also had a significant need to dynamically watermark many of its medical policies—which appear across its public Web sites, portals, and intranet—as well as a need to streamline its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) documentation processes.

To address these issues, Premera selected Oracle Universal Content Management, previously called Stellent Universal Content Management, over a number of competing technology solutions. “We chose Oracle to power multiple Web properties for two reasons,” said Dave Young, vice president of IT Applications, Technology Services & eBusiness for Premera. “First, Oracle’s open architecture provides a single platform and interface to develop extended applications. Second, we can use the Oracle system to easily distribute content ownership and Web publishing responsibilities to business users through workflow automation—keeping our Web presence up-to-date and on-brand.”

Premera has experienced many business benefits as a result of its Oracle Universal Content Management implementation, including more timely and effective communication with internal and external audiences; reduced costs and increased productivity related to Web publishing; enhanced customer service; and compliance with the HIPAA mandate.

Premera uses Oracle Universal Content Management’s records and retention management capabilities to formally manage documents outlining the company’s approach for meeting federally mandated HIPAA requirements. These requirements aim to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery by standardizing electronic data interchange, and protecting health data confidentiality and security. To demonstrate compliance with this regulation, Premera must assess and document its privacy practices, information security systems and procedures, and use of electronic transactions. It also must develop and retain a tested action plan for complying with various aspects of the Act, as well as document technical and management infrastructure processes for implementing these plans.

With the Oracle system, Premera is able to set very specific retention rules related to managing the thousands of HIPAA documents it creates, facilitating continuous compliance with this daunting mandate. A robust workflow and version control system ensures the appropriate company stakeholders review and sign-off on each piece of HIPAA-related documentation and only the most current version of such documentation is readily accessible. Premera also uses Oracle’s records and retention management capabilities to manage intranet documents that it must classify as records.

The Oracle system provides Premera a single, structured location with automated workflow for key HIPAA documentation internal and external auditors need to access and review—making compliance audits much easier and faster. Premera also leverages Oracle’s metadata capabilities to set up HIPAA-specific fields to enhance content searches and retrieve information about a document’s creation. Overall, HIPAA violations can be quite costly, and Oracle Universal Content Management gives the company the records and retention management framework needed to remain compliant.