Executive VP And CIO Interview: WellPoint, Inc. (WLP) - Lori Beer
October 6, 2010 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published Health Care IT Report offering a timely review of the Healthcare Information Services sector. This Special Report contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. Please find an excerpt below.
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Lori Beer is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Indianapolis-based WellPoint, Inc. She is responsible for the evolution of WellPoint's technology strategy and the delivery of enterprise business solutions, focusing on meeting the needs of consumers and providers, while delivering on the commitment to simplify the connection between health, care and value. Ms. Beer is an information technology executive with more than 20 years' experience leading the delivery of strategic business solutions. Her industry experience includes health care, telecommunications and government, with a proven track record of optimizing technology investments and driving cost-efficiency. Ms. Beer serves on the board of directors for the National Accounts Service Company (NASCO) and the Warren County (Ohio) United Way. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Dayton.
TWST: Tell us about WellPoint.
Ms. Beer: Sure. I would start with our mission because the vast majority of the things we are doing truly link back to our mission, which is to improve the lives of the people we serve and the health of our communities. For WellPoint (WLP), that ends up tying what we are doing to three core strategic objectives. One of our core strategic objectives is creating the best health care value for our customers. What this really means is that we understand that the core issue for our customers is making health care fundamentally more affordable.
We also understand that health care is difficult to navigate and difficult to understand, and so the fundamental challenge is ensuring that we are providing our members and our customers with the best access and guidance to the appropriate and best care. So those are lot of the pieces that we focus on. Another key strategic objective on which we focus is excelling at day-to-day execution, and obviously this is critical for us as we continue to move forward. From a broader-brush perspective, we serve more than 33 million members. If you think about that, we provide health insurance to one in nine Americans across 14 states. We've gone through a series of acquisitions, and we now have many specialty products as well, such as dental, vision, life and disability.
TWST: How important is IT to your company? How does it fit within WellPoint's larger corporate goals?
Ms. Beer: IT gets at what the core of what we are trying to do across the industry in terms of improving quality, reducing medical errors, and of course IT is really how we exchange information across the industry through technology. And I'll start with what it really means to WellPoint. Really, it's key for us. If you think about products and services, we are different than many retail companies; we are not a consumer products company where we create a product and put it on the shelf to sell. Our products are created in terms of how we configure our benefits and how we process claims. So similar to financial services, technology is a core enabler to make our products and services real for our customers. That covers everything, including how we simplify the way our customers interact with us. We recently launched a new member Web portal, and the purpose of that is to break down the health care lingo and simplify the experience so that our customers can truly understand the products and services that they've bought from us. We leverage technology a tremendous amount in terms of driving efficiency and automation in our business. In the claims processing component, we want to continue to increase the number of our claims we automatically adjudicate, which will drive efficiency across our operational business.
The other important aspect is data. Again, similar to other companies, not only is that data important because we have a lot of the claims history, but if we are paying the bill of our customers, we have a lot of data on our members. Whatever interactions they had, whether it's at the hospital, their local physician, a specialist, or pharmacy claims, this consolidated information can provide great detail about the clinical experience of our particular members; this information can provide tremendous insights. Data is great, but it's the analytics that you put on top of that that allows you to derive knowledge from that data. Analytics allow us to send health alerts to the providers or to our members around a particular situation, and knowledge is derived from the analysis of claims history and the other data I mentioned. Anything we may send or data that we collect is going to tie into the broader health IT conversation later. So technology is a tremendous enabler and a key core competency for our business, although it is not just about the technology. One of the things we have clearly focused on is making sure that we wrap the technology around the people and the processes within our organization as well. That's truly how we leverage technology on a regular basis inside our company.
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