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PacifiCare takes the plunge The Web team at this health care services firm makes a big splash starting with an executive-only site.
By Peggy Watt PacifiCare Health Systems saw an ocean of opportunity in Web technology, but the company wanted to test the waters before jumping in headfirst. So executives at the Santa Ana, Calif., firm dipped their toes into the tides last summer by testing an intranet, called Compass, developed for their use. For six months, they learned about Web tools by using the site. Compass provides easy access to proprietary records such as sales figures and budgets. Executives can view reports in various formats and import them into spreadsheet applications. The site also includes business news feeds, live stock data and frequently accessed industry resources. "Compass is our way of providing a secured, internal net that recognizes the need to share information with a broad selection of individuals," says Jim Williams, PacifiCare senior vice president and chief information officer. Previously, managers shared such material on a more limited basis and much more slowly. Judy Ehrenreich, who supervises intranet design and content as head of an interdepartmental Web development team, worked with PacifiCare's executives to train them in the use and value of an intranet, as well as to solicit their support. "I knew we couldn't succeed without it," she says. Regardless of their previous exposure to computers, the executives generally liked their experiences with Compass. And so they approved plans for an employee intranet and an extranet, as well as a general network overhaul.
Sea ChangesThe technology decisions came together at a time of change for PacifiCare. In February 1997, the company acquired a competitor, Foundation Health Plan (FHP), which was almost equal to PacifiCare's size. The resulting combination is a $10 billion firm with operations in 14 states and Guam. PacifiCare had been planning to revamp its network when the merger occurred; development of the intranet, called Planet, and the challenge of doubling in size simply made the change more dramatic. "The former FHP had to get to the same technological baseline in order to launch both parts of the company to the next step," says Ehrenreich, who is also vice president of human resources operations. It all came together early this spring. IS laid the new network plumbing; Ehrenreich's team prepared to populate the internal Web; and the applications development team produced a framework of pages. With executives backing the project, PacifiCare's intranet grew with vigor. "That lead time with Compass really helped grease the skids for building Planet," Ehrenreich says. (click for screen shot) To populate Planet, Ehrenreich assembled a cross-functional team of 15 users representing each major PacifiCare department and has held monthly meetings since January to determine protocol, rules, content and appearance. They use Microsoft FrontPage and Windows Notepad to design pages, and share templates with other users who want to post content. The pages use similar designs but have department- or region-specific color schemes. Part of the team's role is to encourage participation, and new sites pop up regularly.
HR's OdysseyThe HR site, called Odyssey, is extensive because the company's numerous regions have different services. But the resulting effort is comprehensive. Odyssey includes sections on benefits, a reference library and general employee information such as job listings and training programs. Online forms are a big HR effort: Using Odyssey, employees can fill out time cards, submit performance appraisals, change personnel information and register for benefits. "We're moving to a very self-servicing environment," says Damon Lovett, HR information services analyst and a team member representing HR. For now, employees forward online forms as Microsoft Outlook e-mail attachments. This provides an audit trail, but the HR team plans on migrating to a formal workflow system between the e-mail and PeopleSoft personnel management software. Because employees are also PacifiCare health insurance customers, they make ideal beta testers for applications that the company will eventually market. One such example is for an extranet application. HR staffers have created a knowledge base using the Health Care Encyclopedia published by HealthWise in Boise, Idaho. Users can search health care topics for preventative information, referrals and other resources. (click for screen shot) The Health Care Encyclopedia comprises 70M bytes of data, mostly in 15,000 static but searchable HTML files, and is updated quarterly, says Randy Jackson, an IS staff member who is a liaison to the intranet content team. PacifiCare plans to offer the knowledge base not only to its member customers but also to employee groups whose employers subscribe to PacifiCare. "We used to give out these huge paperbound books that were almost immediately out-of-date, so this is a great thing to provide online," Jackson says.
Swelling TidesWhile the content team designed pages, IS cranked along behind the scenes so the structure and tools would be ready when the sites were done. "We needed a scalable, cost-effective network to handle mission-critical, bandwidth-intensive applications," says Rick Garcia, PacifiCare's PC network operations manager. At its California sites, PacifiCare installed redundant switched Ethernet LANs and standardized on 3Com network gear to deliver traffic to desktops (see graphic). Most employees access Planet using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers running on Windows 95 or NT Workstation Pentium PCs. The PCs are typically replacing X terminals. The next major job is Web-enabling legacy data resources - warehouses full of company data and databases with general industry and governmental information. Already the company's Web site, www.pacificare.com, is the gateway to an extranet. Different levels of access are available to individual customers, corporate customers (such as an HR representative or health plan coordinator), health care providers and brokers. Applications in development will let sales representatives and customers determine eligibility standards for benefits. Customers will be able to change their policies online. The legacy data is protected by a firewall, and users will need passwords and Secure Sockets Layer security for access. (click for screen shot) Web applications are operated at the data center on an application relay server, a Digital Alpha server running Windows NT. It is separate from the intranet's Microsoft Internet Information Server - to allow another layer of security, Jackson says. Part of the IS mission is to see if an application is useful to multiple departments so redundant development can be avoided, Jackson says. For example, the online-eligibility program uses the same back end as the older interactive-voice-response program that provides much of the same information. To Jackson, the multilevel Web project is dramatically expansive. He points to the fact that when he and Webmaster Jeff Dailey designed PacifiCare's World Wide Web site in 1995, only about 30 employees had browsers. Now he estimates that 9,000 PacifiCare employees are browsing. "It's been a long road," he says. Ehrenreich pictures the project rather as a continuing stream. "The intranet will be a living, evolving tool," she says. "It will never be done." |
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