Benelicious takes a bite out of healthcare costs with Force.com

It’s hard to open a newspaper these days without reading about the rising cost of healthcare. In today’s uncertain economy, consumers and businesses alike are feeling the pinch. Benelicious is a new company that helps midsize companies manage their employee benefits programs more cost-effectively. Its founders have applied the Force.com platform to create efficiencies and cost savings of up to 20 percent for their clients. Savings like that are something to savor.

A new ingredient for benefits management

Providing health-related coverage and other employee benefits is a significant expense for many businesses. In fact, the cost is usually second only to salaries. The Benelicious founding team had previously worked together at a traditional benefits management company. That’s when they discovered that midsize companies are typically paying 20+ percent more than necessary for employee insurance. According to Jack Irby, Benelicious’s CTO, “We recognized long ago that there was a tremendous opportunity to reduce benefits expenses, but the technology wasn’t available to do it in a cost-effective way.”

When the founders saw a demo of Force.com, they quickly realized the cloud-computing platform was the solution they needed. By streamlining the collection of information for open enrollment and life changes (such as weddings or births), applying workflows, and providing easy access to real-time data, a Force.com-based application could deliver significant efficiencies and make a sizeable bottom line impact. After sketching a quick list of ingredients, Benelicious was born.

The Benelicious application and service (currently in pre-beta) collects and manages employee data, and transmits it to insurance carriers on a monthly basis. As Irby explains, “With more accurate and up-to-date data, we can be sure clients have the correct information about their employees and are paying carriers only what they should be. Plus, the easy-to-use interface will have a positive impact on employee satisfaction.”
 

Force.com is the “special sauce”

Reflecting on his time at a traditional benefits management company, “It was sometimes frustrating to see the money clients left on the table,” Irby says. “Many used paper-based systems. Data was incomplete or incorrect. Rekeying was manual and prone to error. And the entire process took way too long. With Force.com, we finally found a way to address the problems that had been bothering us for years.”

Using Force.com pages, Benelicious built a custom, consumer-friendly interface for collecting employee data. Each client employee has a unique user ID that allows access and the ability to update personal benefits-related information from any Internet-connected computer. Changes are instantly recorded and accessible by plan administrators. A second interface was developed specifically for client HR staff. This interface lets HR managers interact with employee data fields such as start and end dates or salaries while ensuring that private information stays private. A third interface lets the company’s client services team manage the overall org for the client, including insurance carrier data transfer.

“Our secret sauce is in Force.com workflows,” explains Irby. “Insurance plans are incredibly complex—much more than the employee realizes. For example, if an employee is getting married, we can present him with the data that he’s able to change and the limits within which he can change it. Then, we can make sure that the right follow-up steps are taken. This process lets us proactively manage client accounts. Instead of passively waiting for an insurance carrier’s bill, we can actually tell the carrier what coverage is needed and what the client’s bill should be.”
 

Cooking up a Force.com application

Getting started with Force.com was fast and easy. Irby and the company’s data architect spent 2 weeks attending the DEV401 (“Building Applications with Force.com and Visualforce”) and DEV501 (“Apex and Visualforce Controllers”) courses. “After 2 weeks of Force.com immersion, we were ready to get started,” Irby explains. “We got a nice lay of the land and we started writing code immediately afterwards.”

With Force.com, just four employees (Irby, the data architect, and two others) were able to build an extremely complex application from scratch in just a year. According to Irby, “At the old company, we went through an extensive process of designing a similar solution using .NET. When we built out the schedule, we saw that it would take us 3 years with 5 developers to complete. Needless to say, we never moved forward.”

“With Force.com, development took only ⅓ of the time. The platform’s flexibility was key to helping us wrap up quickly,” he continues. “The Force.com environment was extremely well thought out. Our rules-based architecture lets us enter plans into our system and configure by making changes to the data, not via the code. And as we bring more clients on, it will let us roll out quickly and ensure accurate data collection.”
 

A recipe for success

Force.com helps Benelicious meet other key client needs, including security. Healthcare and salary information is highly sensitive, and potential clients are particularly concerned about the security of their data. Force.com passed the toughest security certifications in the industry, including ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, and SysTrust. It’s also compliant with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), a key requirement for the company’s customers.

Irby also appreciates that with Force.com, he can be sure of availability. “As a technology manager, it’s incredibly refreshing not to have to think about a machine. Is it running well? Is it healthy? Is it going to be there tomorrow? The stress of managing a secure environment and ensuring that it’s 99.9 percent available is incredible. With Force.com, I can stay focused on the business and let salesforce.com worry about the infrastructure.”

The Benelicious beta is scheduled to start in 2Q 2010. Irby looks forward to bringing on additional clients throughout the spring and summer. “I saw a prediction that companies in this space will be spending $800 billion annually on healthcare over the next few years,” he says. “There’s a huge opportunity for savings. And with Force.com, we’re ready to help.”

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