On the Record
In 1996 regional health insurer Vytra Health Plans ($316 million in revenues) hired Russ Esposito away from his job as CIO of the State University of New York at Stonybrook to transform the Melville, N.Y.-based carrier's IT organization. Esposito's Internet savvy helped the carrier to an early entree into the wired world. One of the first insurers to provide transactions on a Web site-in 1998-Vytra continues to focus on cutting-edge technology to serve its 200,000-and-growing membership. I&T: Vytra's avowed vision is to understand customer needs and "deliver adaptive solutions that exceed expectations." How is technology supporting that aim at Vytra today? Esposito: We've experienced tremendous growth with ASO (Administrative Services Only plans) business, where the party is self-insured and we essentially provide claims processing and administration of the plan. For this environment you need to have systems that are very flexible to support the great variety of demands of this self-insured customer base. It's been a strategic initiative for us, and it's something we've been able to keep pace with because of the technology we have. I&T: Consumer-directed healthcare is a market approach that also requires flexibility and intense customer focus. Does Vytra intend to capitalize on that trend? Esposito: We think consumer-directed healthcare has a market, and we're examining it very carefully with a view toward gearing up our systems. That will probably require a combination of internal development and vendor software purchases. I don't think anyone knows how deeply it will take root in the industry. But we do see some significant success stories, in particular from some smaller start-up companies-such as Lumenos (Alexandria, Va.) and Definity (St. Louis Park, Minn.)-that have addressed flexible spending accounts or self-directed accounts. So it's something that makes sense to add to our portfolio because Vytra has the ability to quickly change its systems-which we've proven in our ASO business. We believe we'll have the ability to quickly get the technology in place to accommodate the self-directed plans. We also think that our strength in document and workflow management will give us the ability to accommodate whatever the challenges are going to be in this new market segment.
I&T: What are you doing to make your document management capabilities state-of-the-art? Esposito: As part of our move toward becoming a paperless organization, we're in the process of replacing our existing (SunGard-owned) Macess document management system, and we are implementing the nextgeneration Softheon (Hauppauge, N.Y.) offering. This will take us to a new level. Softheon is an XML-based, open-architecture document management solution through which we can tie our capability that can be integrated to any system in the enterprise. Macess-a good system that may fit some organizations' needs very well-provided some templates and workflow criteria we could change, but we really had to work within the application.