Battling the Complexity of Aging Web and Content Management Platforms

Operating as a BlueCross BlueShield franchise and as Univera Healthcare in Western New York, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield is upstate New York’s largest nonprofit health plan. Headquartered in Rochester, New York, Excellus is part of a $6 billion family of companies that finances and delivers health care services across upstate New York and long-term care insurance nationwide. Collectively, Excellus provides health insurance to nearly 1.5 million members and employs about 4,000 New Yorkers.

The company’s guiding principles include providing members a simple, secure, confident and compassionate customer experience. To live up to those principles, Excellus needed to deliver an intuitive and content-rich online experience, as well as the information, tools, and content its staff and providers need to deliver an exceptional level of care and support. However, Excellus was constrained by an aging IBM WebSphere Portal web and content management platform for delivering external and internal facing web applications, which greatly limited the functional capabilities IT and the business could provide. “The existing systems were old and costly to use and maintain, with a complex development environment, and an overall lack of integration between our web, back-end, and content management applications,” said Timothy Schwab, Vice President Consumer Technology at Excellus BCBS. “We needed a solution that integrates all these pieces, with an intuitive, robust interface for content creation and management, secure, flexible, role-based access management, and the ability to personalize the experience for any member, provider, or staff.”