Project Description

MyPlanLink is a marketplace platform for health insurance providers (aka providers for short) that offers their customers a branded experience to shop, quote, compare, and enroll in a variety of health, dental, and vision products.

The goal was to build a set of web services that this platform could flexibly and safely pass customer enrollment and payment information to which could then submit it to the health insurance providers. This included:

• Tokenization of payment information
• Reception of enrollment from the platform
• Transformation from received enrollment into providers’ formats
• Submission of enrollments and payment information to providers’

Contributions

Out of a team of developers, my primary contributions were:

• Payment tokenization and ecryption
• Test harness for tokenization
• Submission of enrollments to providers

Challenges Overcame

This was my first experience building something that tokenized and encrypted actual payment information which was a high-security, business-critical task. This involved a variety of encryption techniques and software to accomplish.

The biggest challenge was scalability. For n number of health insurance providers, there can be n number of enrollment submission methods that they themselves require to receive the enrollment, such as:

• E-fax of PDF enrollments
• Token-protected web APIs with enrollment as custom-formatted in JSON
• .NET SOAP web services protected with encryption and public keys
• PDFs sent via FTP for manual processing

Accomplishments

This was a brand new business venture and a new concept in the development of the federal and state-run marketplaces for the Affordable Healthcare Act.

The skills I developed most were:

• Web service security techniques and standards
• Scalability
• Service-oriented architecture focus
• Encryption and tokenization
• Working with clients’ technical teams directly

Project Description

Beazley had a group enrollment platform where the companies could only enroll one employee at a time using a wizard-based flow.

The task on this project was to overhaul it to facilitate real-time mass-employee enrolling. We were tasked to:

• Allowed bulk, asynchronous adds/changes of employees and coverages
• Integrate into the existing Beazley Employer Portal that their groups use
• Ensure fast performance and real-time enrollment processing

Contributions

I worked on a team of developers that worked directly with the business unit as well as the middleware teams who provided the real-time enrollment processing web services.

Some of the tasks we split up amongst ourselves were:

• Design interactive jQuery UI allowing adds/changes to be done on one screen
• Submit enrollments to a backend Java/WMB XML web service using AJAX
• Add real-time status tracking of new enrollments and changes

On top of these design & development tasks, I took on the job of predicting, organizing, and estimating every task we all had to do to ship the product.

Challenges Overcame

This project was the biggest undertaking I had to date in terms of cross-team coordination due to all the Java technology being leveraged:

• WMB - Manage queues and inter-application communications/mapping
• Business Rules Team - Validate business rule on XML request from us
• Java Team - Transform validated XML request into 834 flat file for Admin
• Admin/COBOL - Issue policies & changes on the mainframe

Accomplishments

The greatest accomplishment of this project was that our system saves the insured companies/groups dozens of hours every enrollment period, reducing their frustration and increasing their satisfaction as Beazley customers.

Project Description

An in-house-built, pre-existing payment portal tokenizes and processes payments for various healh insurance carriers selling coverage on the Heathcare.gov “Federal Marketplace”.

A good half of the states under the Affordable Healthcare Act have elected to run their own state-based marketplaces instead.

The payment portal was initially designed around the strict standards of that Federal Marketplace, which state-based marketplaces do not have to follow.

To scale the payment portal to any number of state-based marketplaces, it had to:

• Accept any request type, not just Healthcare.gov-formatted SAML XML
• Configure client-specific features and customizations
• Send any response type, not just Healthcare.gov-formatted POST response
• Support any type of request-level security, eg:
  • Restful POST request tokens
  • Signed SAML
  • SOAP encryption

Contributions

This project consisted of two senior developers: myself, and another who was in charge of a different state marketplace.

Together, we crafted the solutions that allowed this payment portal to scale to any number of state marketplaces.

We wrapped the application with configurable pre and post processors, which were in charge of the request/response handling, security, and application-level configurations.

Test harnesses were also created to simulate the state marketplaces where the users would be coming from to submit payments.

Challenges Overcame

This project was a tidal wave of advanced concepts and technologies that I have only been previously exposed to minimally.

I have to seriously step my game up in the areas of cryptography, SOAP web services, and SAML processing, and learned a lot of new tools in the process.

Accomplishments

The payment portal was already highly successful, processing payments in the federal marketplace, which is roughly half of the states in the U.S.

By upgrading this application to flexibly scale to any number of state-based marketplaces, Healthplan Services is able to tap into the markets of the other half of the U.S, which all have state-based marketplaces of some kind.

Project Description

A quoting web application was needed by sales representatives to calculate new premiums for changes against the existing policies of members calling in, such as:

• Add new dependents
• Move to new address
• Add or change plans

Contributions

I worked on a team of three developers that worked directly with the business unit and policy rating teams to gather requirements and brainstorm how to overcome issues in the existing policy quoting applications used by Cigna and Coventry at the time.

The design phase concluded with a 20-page high level design document outlining:

• Problems with existing in-force quoting applications
• Business solutions to those problems
• System changes
  • Hierarchy of system controllers and views
  • Navigation
  • Error handling
• Design of each step in quoting process, including flow diagrams
• Overview of business features in each step in quoting process

My contributions during the development phase consisted of writing or co-writing:

• System-level models and controllers
• Preprocessor that gathers:
  • Policy-level & tier information
  • Employee & dependent information
  • Benefits & plans
  • Billing & premium data
• Module-specific views, controllers, and service controllers
• Error Handling

Challenges Overcame

This was my first enterprise-level web application built from the ground up.

Scalability was the toughest challenge to overcome. This application effectively consolidated all other policy-change quoting applications before it, and in their place, provided a single, scalable solution.

It had to allow the following features to be configurable for any number of health insurance carriers:

• Policy setups
• Coverage setups
• Benefit structures
• Policy Rating engines and algorithms
• Business rules

Accomplishments

This quoting application is still in use today and continues to be a great asset. It has grown to provide policy change quoting for the following health insurance carriers:

• Coventry
• Cigna
• Florida Blue
• Blue Shield
• Aetna

It has grown to quote 500,000 premiums on 40,000 policies per year currently.

Project Description

AVMA has a multi-user site for agents, students, and members that allows all three to run insurance quotes:

• Agent Portal - Agents sell policies, run quotes, and manage sales
• Student Portal - Students view coverage, make payments, and get quotes
• Member Portal - Members view coverage, make payments, and get quotes

Contributions

My work with AVMA’s portals in 2012 were driven largely by new feature requests:

• Integrate Google Analytics’ conversion funnels for the quoting process
• Streamline the quoting process to increase usability
• Add new products for quoting, PDF proposal rendering, and premium rating

Challenges Overcame

The biggest challenges I faced were with Google Analytics and AVMA’s complex product offering:

• Implement Google Analystics and funneling for the first time
• Working with complex rating, plan, and benefit structures previously unexposed to

Accomplishments

The AVMA portals were the first modular applications I’ve ever worked with and really opened by eyes for application development in terms of scalability and reusability.

Project Description

Cigna had four web applications to facilitate sales of health and dental insurance

• Broker Portal - Agents sell policies, run quotes, and view commissions data
• Quoting Portal - Individuals get quotes for health & dental coverage
• Enrollment Portal - Individuals enroll in health & dental policies
• Member Portal - Members view benefits, make payments, and track claims

Contributions

My work with Cigna’s portals spanned three years, driven largely by new feature requests:

• Support for quoting dental products across ten states
• Add and terminate health products across ten states for quoting & enrollment
• Overhaul the billing calculations and layout for members
• Modify PDF proposals generated with PDFlib

I also created a bulk premium rating tool that allows internal rate analysts to run large data sets through uploadable spreadsheets to test their own quote rating engines.

Challenges Overcame

This period marked a lot of growth for me as a junior web developer coming from a startup company, getting my feet wet with enterprise-level web applications.

The biggest challenges I faced were mostly enterprise firsts:

• Absorb the vast business domain of health & related insurance
• Implement DB2 cursors to facilitate server-side pagination in result sets
• Write design and test documents
• Collaborate on teams of business analysts, project managers, and QA

There were also technical challenges where I was in over my head:

• Learn an in-house-built MVC framework, also my first MVC framework
• Map values to PDFs proposals using complex XMLs
• Work with AJAX using Prototype to call premium rating web services

Accomplishments

My biggest personal accomplishment was conquering the huge learning curve of domain knowledge and enterprise exposure as a junior developer.

My longest lasting accomplishment is the previously-mentioned bulk premium rating tool, which is still in use today and continues to save countless hours for an entire team of rate analysts.