Cigna Quoting and Enrollment Portals

• applications: Broker, Enrollment, and Quoting Portals


• client: Cigna


• project date: 2010 - 2012


• summary: Maintenance for Cigna's quoting system (billing calculation overhauls and PDFlib-generated PDF proposals), and creation of bulk premium testing application.

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, largely driven 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 application to date is the bulk premium rating tool. It is still in use today and still saves countless hours for a team of rate analysts.