Medica Posts 15% Increase in Individual Product Applications in First Month

SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 29, 2005--Since launching ikaSystems' technology on September 6, 2005, hits on the Individual product portion of Medica's website have increased from 5,700 total since January 1, 2005 to almost 13,000 for the month of October alone. That's an increase of over 125%, partly due to consumer response to the online automation of Medica's Individual product line. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," says Ravi Ika, President and CEO of ikaSystems. "We are pleased with Medica's results and look forward to phasing in other ikaSystems' products of equal magnitude," he adds.





ikaSystems' powerful web-enabled Sales portal automates the entire sales cycle for Medica, whose custom solution includes online health insurance quote and proposal generation, application ability, and medical underwriting.



As expected, automating the sales cycle via ikaSystems technology has increased sales, simplified the application process, and decreased administrative costs. "We've seen a 30% increase in individual health insurance applications in the last two months (based on the previous three month average) since we've launched the Sales portal," says Mark Owen, Vice President & General Manager, Center for Healthy Aging at Medica Health Plans.



Online enrollment has reduced Medica's administrative costs significantly. "We get fewer incomplete applications, which is the biggest cost-cutting factor," says Owen. Before, with Medica's paper-based application process there were many errors--such as incorrectly calculated premiums--which added to the processing timeline. Now, Medica's administrative staff has to do less "scrubbing" to complete applications, which results in a quicker response time to Underwriting, Owen adds.



ikaSystems and Medica are currently finalizing the Underwriting portion of the Admin portal, with deployment scheduled for the beginning of 2006. "When the Admin portal is fully implemented, we expect to see a significant increase in our throughput," says Owen. "The system will deal automatically with the simple black and white accept/reject decisions; thereby, reducing the number of applications that actually need underwriter review," he adds.