Product Updates

Q1 2024

Level-Funded Quoting in Seconds

Quoting—Plan & rate data

In collaboration with Angle Health, we’re thrilled to unveil our latest quoting enhancement: offering synchronous underwritten level-funded quotes that can be delivered in 1-2 minutes—a game-changer for quoting that significantly transforms the industry standard.

With minimal group information required, our solution ensures a seamless integration process, enabling brokers to obtain firm small group level-funded quotes alongside fully-insured plans. Built with scalability, our platform aligns with existing workflows and provides customizable solutions to meet carriers’ specific requirements. As we embark on this journey, our focus remains on scaling partnerships and empowering BenTechs to capitalize on this transformative opportunity.

Real-time Quotes Direct from UHC’s New API

Quoting—Plan & rate data

Over the past year, we’ve been working with UHC to streamline quoting processes across all nodes on our platform while minimizing development requirements. Our collaboration with them marks a significant milestone as we migrate medical, dental and vision activities to new UHC APIs. These enhancements satisfy UHC’s new quoting requirements effective for January 1, 2025 rates and beyond, which typically begin around September or October.

With an emphasis on improving carrier visibility and providing faster, more accurate quotes, our platform exposes real-time rates sourced from carriers during the quoting process. This allows us to deliver near 100% accuracy and quote identifiers to facilitate triage and sold case processes.

Provider NPI Mapping for Improved Network Quality

Provider Network Data

In an effort to continue delivering the most accurate, best-in-class provider network data, we’ve addressed a major challenge in mapping indirectly-sourced data without National Provider Identifiers (NPIs). Our focus on provider mapping has resulted in significant improvements, with up to 90% increases in providers mapped across various networks. This translates to over 1.5 million additional associations between networks and their providers, enriching our dataset and improving user experiences. These enhancements directly benefit users by increasing the likelihood of finding the right provider within their network, ultimately reducing support issues.

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December 2023

Dependent-Level Rates & Members Quoted

Quoting—Plan & rate data

This summer, we announced updates to Ideon’s quoting endpoints which enable users to deliver even more transparency to quoted groups. The Group Member Management endpoint returns unique identifiers for each dependent in the group, and the Display Member Rates endpoint returns an array of dependent_premiums, which references the unique dependent identifiers and their associated premiums. We also updated our display rates endpoint so that users can now retrieve information on the total number of members within a group and the number of members quoted.

Standardization of Group and Hospital Affiliations

Quoting—Network data

We improved the shop-by-doc experience by adding two new elements – Group Affiliations and Hospital Affiliations.

With these additional data, shop-by-doc applications will be able to provide more guidance to users navigating healthcare recommendations and provider decisions. Group and hospital affiliation data elements will be provided for each provider by network where applicable, accessible through our bulk network data and API. For more information on the changes, please check out our providers API documentation.

Medicare Advantage Benefit Expansion

Quoting—Plan & rate data

Earlier this year, we updated our Medicare Advantage benefit data by adding comprehensive allowance and limitation information to our data sets, processed in our context-free grammar. In addition, 9 new benefits such as acupuncture, home safety devices and modifications, and others were also added.

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November 2023

Enhancement to Ideon Dashboard: Discrepancies

Enrollment

This summer marked the launch of the Ideon Dashboard, giving our customers enhanced visibility into enrollment data and streamlined issue resolution. Now, we’re elevating your data visibility experience by releasing an exciting dashboard feature: Enrollment Discrepancies.

This feature offers real-time access to data discrepancies between carrier and platform systems, including clear insight into exactly which information differs. You’ll have more data on demand, and the most straightforward resolution pathway possible.

For a quick guide on how to navigate this new feature, watch this two-minute video walkthrough by our VP of Product, Jashan Ahuja.

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October 2023

Angle Health Level Funded Core Integration

Quoting—Plan & rate data

In the coming days, we’ll be going live with an integration to Angle Health’s API to quote their Level Funded products. Angle is able to provide underwritten rates within seconds to minutes, something unique in the market. Through Ideon, these can be quoted alongside our comprehensive set of employer-sponsored plans via the same quoting endpoints. Only small additions to integrations with Ideon’s API are required. For more information on how to quote, please reach out to your account manager.

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September 2023

Ideon & Delta Dental

Quoting—Plan & rate data

We’re excited to announce our new ancillary carrier partnership with Delta Dental. As part of this partnership, Delta Dental will be providing their plan and rate data for their state-leading small business program. For additional information on our new carrier partnerships, please visit Planwatch.

OEP Preparedness for BenAdmin platforms

Quoting—Plan & rate data

As we approach the open enrollment period, our Customer Success Manager, Kevin Montgomery, has shared some valuable insights to help you navigate OEP 2024 with ease. In this 3-minute video, he covers:

• 2024 plan data is available
• New lines of coverage now displayed in Planwatch
• An overview of our Customer Portal and expanding Knowledge Base

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July 2023

Planwatch: Ancillary Plan Availability 

Quoting—Plan & rate data

With year 2024 preparations underway, we’re pleased to announce that ancillary lines of coverage will be available in Ideon’s Planwatch. Starting August 1st, readiness for Dental, Vision, Life, Disability, Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity quoting will be shown for each carrier. Additionally, enhancements have been completed to display estimated release dates for plans embargoed or undergoing testing by carriers.

Ideon’s Planwatch can be accessed here. Data will be refreshed every 10 minutes.

Beam Ancillary Rating API Integration

Quoting—Plan & rate data

We have successfully launched our integration with Beam’s Ancillary Rating API, offering coverage for Dental, Vision, Life, Accident, and Hospital Indemnity plans. Next, we work towards integrating Critical Illness coverage. Through this direct API integration, Beam can now provide its competitive rates, taking into account employer and employee attributes. Additionally, plan and quote identifiers unique to Beam are returned in this new process and can be used to expedite the case installation process.

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June 2023

COMING SOON – The Ideon Dashboard

Enrollment

In the coming months, we’re excited to release a new feature for our enrollment customers: the Ideon Dashboard, an interface built for improved visibility and efficient issue resolution. This innovative dashboard is designed to seamlessly complement Ideon’s suite of API endpoints, enhancing your ability to monitor group implementation status and submit, track, and resolve issues with unparalleled efficiency. You’ll get real-time status updates for groups in the queue and stay informed about the progress of your enrollment data.

Talk to your Ideon account representative to learn more, and check out a short teaser here.

Custom Webhook URLs

Enrollment

Quick refresher, in case you’re not familiar with them: Webhooks work like push notifications, allowing for more real-time updates about important changes in our system, like Qualifying Life Events, coverage period status, or enrollment discrepancies. We’ve recently enhanced our webhook suite so you can now add and manage customizable webhook URLs, providing additional flexibility with your internal systems and new security enhancements.

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May 2023

Dependent-Level Rates & Members Quoted

Quoting—Plan & rate data

We are happy to announce a couple of updates to Ideon’s quoting endpoints which enable users to deliver even more transparency to quoted groups.

First, we have enhanced our display member-rates endpoint so you can now obtain a comprehensive breakdown of rates for each dependent in a group, in addition to its members.

• The Group Member Management endpoint will now return unique identifiers for each dependent in a group.
• The Display Member Rates endpoint now returns an array of dependent_premiums, which references the unique dependent identifiers and their associated premiums.

Second, we have updated our display rates endpoint so that users can now retrieve information on the total number of members within a group and the number of members quoted.

• The Display Rates endpoint has two additions. First, in the meta object, total_members is added to show the count of members in the group at the time of quoting. Second, each quoted plan will have the count of members_quoted included.

Standardization of Group and Hospital Affiliations

Decision support—Provider-network data

At Ideon, we are continually seeking new ways to enhance our industry-leading provider-network dataset. To further enable shop-by-doc experiences, we identified two elements for enhancement through standardizing data:

• Group Affiliations
• Hospital Affiliations

By utilizing these data, shop-by-doc applications will be able to provide more guidance as their users navigate healthcare recommendations and make informed decisions in choosing a provider.

Group and hospital affiliation data elements will be provided for each provider by network where applicable, accessible through our bulk network data and API by the end of May. For more information on the changes, please check out our providers API documentation.

FHIR Data Ingestion Advancements

Decision support—Provider-network data

In 2021, CMS established new interoperability mandates for health plans. The CMS Patient Access Rule is designed to make provide- network information more easily available to patients by implementing HL7 FHIR® APIs.

We are excited to announce that we expanded our FHIR data ingestion capabilities for carriers seeking to connect with us, maximizing partnership opportunities to supply more direct data for our API users.

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April 2023

Full LDEx Capabilities

Enrollment

Ideon is a core member of the LIMRA Data Exchange Standards Committee and has fully implemented the LDEx Benefits Enrollment Management (BEM) Standard as well as the LDEx Response (RSP) format. Additionally Ideon serves on the LIMRA sub-committee focused on developing the transactional API model for benefit data in the LDEx format.

Whether you’re a carrier or benefits platform, reach out to your account rep to learn more about Ideon’s LDEx capabilities.

Coverage Transmissions

Enrollment

Ideon provides full visibility into data that tech platforms have transmitted to carriers via Ideon, whether sent through API or file format. This coverage transmission data can be pulled directly from our API endpoints and includes complete transmission history by group or a specific member. Platforms can expose coverage transmissions to end users to provide greater transparency, and can use the information for reporting and auditing purposes.

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March 2023

Medicare Advantage Benefit Expansion

Quoting—Plan & rate data

One of our goals at Ideon is to help people understand the value of their insurance coverage. This goal is achieved by continuously maintaining our comprehensive data sets across all market segments and lines of coverage. This month, we’re happy to announce updates to our Medicare Advantage benefit data.

First, we added comprehensive allowance and limitation information to our benefits sets, processed in our context-free grammar. Second, we added 9 new benefits that have become increasingly common in plans over recent years:

• Acupuncture
• Home Safety Devices and Modifications
• In-Home Support Services
• Meals
• Over the Counter
• Personal Emergency Response System
• Remote Access Technology
• Telehealth
• Worldwide Emergency

With these updates, users of our Medicare Advantage data are all the more empowered to help individuals make better informed decisions when choosing a Medicare Advantage plan. If your platform is not currently utilizing our Medicare Advantage data for quoting or if you’re interested in learning how our industry-leading provider-network data can power shop-by-doc applications, please reach out to your Ideon sales representative or email us at sales@ideonapi.com.

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January 2023

Ancillary quoting via carriers’ APIs

Quoting—Plan & rate data

To kick off 2023, we are building the infrastructure to support rating through carriers’ quoting APIs. The goal is to aggregate them into our industry-leading, multi-carrier Group Rating API to provide the most accurate, competitive rates for API-to-API ancillary quoting, and at the same time meet the trend of carriers building their own rating APIs.

Over the coming quarters, we’ll be progressively adding carrier APIs to rate plans, while continuing to rate through our own engine for the rest. This will be available in a new version of our quoting endpoint; no short term action is required to continue quoting ancillary plan inventory with current integrations. More technical details to follow in the upcoming months.

Provider Network Data Analyzer

Decision support—Provider-network data

Accuracy in health plan provider directories is essential in ensuring that consumers make the right decisions on their care, but provider network data sets are vast and difficult to maintain. This month, we are launching our Provider Network Data Analyzer tool, which generates a predictive score for each provider address to provide back to carriers a level of confidence for the accuracy of their data.

Using the model’s output, we want to empower our carrier partners to better manage and maintain quality data within their provider networks. This will ultimately provide more accurate data to power InsurTech platforms, and an enhanced member experience for users of InsurTech’s online apps and decision support tools.