Policy Change Quoting

• application: Policy Change Quoting


• clients: Cigna, Florida Blue, Blue Shield, Coventry, Aetna


• project date: 2013 - 2016


• summary: Internal quoting application that calcaulates premiums for address, dependent, and plan changes against existing health insurance policies.

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 a 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 code for:

• System-level models and controllers
• Preprocessor that gathers data from DB2 or web services:
  • 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, prodiving 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.