MessengerPlus Guarantees Blue Cross of America Good Checkups
WellPoint Health Networks, the publicly traded managed care affiliate of Blue Cross of California, is one of the nation's 500 largest companies, according to Fortune Magazine's "Fortune 500" ranking for 1996. Last Summer when WellPoint launched its WellPoint Dental Alliance, a managed care system for dental offices, MessengerPlus was placed on 24-hour duty, in charge of making sure operations run smoothly for dental practices. WellPoint Dental Alliances, which went live in July with its first dental practice, manages various aspects of California dental practice operations, including patient care, billing and report generation, according to Darrel Mouton, AS/400 systems administrator for the alliance.
"We needed common communications through three focal points: here at the AS/400 operations at the Blue Cross corporate headquarters in Woodland Hills; the dental alliance finance group in Camarillo, about 26 miles away; and the project manager located within the dental group in San Jose" said Mouton.
The Solution
Having used MessengerPlus in his previous employment, Mouton knew it was just the ticket WellPoint needed to keep the new operation running smoothly. Each alliance manager can stay appraised of system changes and updates by monitoring the day-to-day activities of the AS/400 system. "One of the unique things we do using MessengerPlus is to link our systems to another AS/400 owned by our software developer, Tully Health Systems in Appleton, Wisc.," said Mouton. "Tully and I have linked two pager companies together so both parties can monitor messaging functions in the evening when information is exchanged between the two AS/400s. If there is a bottleneck Tully gets paged from our system. Tully's paging company has an "800" national service so it was very easy to set up."
WellPoint's decentralized operations are structured to enable flexibility in the rapidly changing managed care environment. MessengerPlus enables WellPoint's data operations to function cohesively and reliably. Because of that, WellPoint has come to depend on MessengerPlus software and on the technical expertise of Bytware.
"I think Bytware's technical support is one of the best that I've dealt with," said Mouton. "With Bytware, you can just pick up the phone and get an issue resolved because of the amount of knowledge technicians have. They're reliable, very fast and knowledgeable about the industry itself." For WellPoint's AS/400, MessengerPlus is like a good check up at the dentist.
The IBM AS/400 system is running flawlessly in one of the nation's 500 largest companies, thanks to MessengerPlus, a state-of-the-art message monitoring and paging system.
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Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: Blue Cross of America
Summary
The WellPoint Dental Alliance managed care system for dental offices is running smoothly thanks to Bytware's state-of-the-art message monitoring and paging system, MessengerPlus.
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