nib outsources to HealthStream for BPO solution

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 01 October 2009 11:29

IT Industry - Deals

Listed Australian health fund group, nib, has signed a five year contract with BPO solutions vendor, HEALTHStream, to automate and manage over 600,000 high-volume paper-based transactions annually.

Under the outsourcing deal, the nib rollout of HEALTHStream’s Australian-developed technology will be the first large-scale rollout of the new services and technology from HEALTHStream, which is an Australian consortium of BPO specialists, Salmat, Civica and Dataract, formed in 2008.

According to nib CEO, Mark Fitzgibbon, the HEALTHStream solution, developed specifically for the health insurance industry, will deliver greater automation across claims administrative services at nib, as well as enhance the customer experience.

“We currently process approximately 600,000 inbound paper-based transactions annually, which historically have been received, scanned, entered and processed manually. This type of manual handing and data capture impacts on costs, consistency, scalability and ultimately the customer’s experience.”

Fitzgibbon said that using HEALTHStream’s automation solution, nib hoped to improve its service to customers by “speeding up the claims and transaction processes, which translates into us being more responsive to our customers’ needs.

“The change will also lead to savings in operational costs through the reduction of manual handing of high volume, low complexity and low monetary-value transactions. This greater efficiency will reduce operational costs and also free our employees to work on strategic business imperatives in the claims and policy administration area.”

Fitzgibbon said the HEALTHStream services will be used by nib on a pay-per-transaction model, and therefore does not “represent an up-front capital investment and hence risk for nib.”