pronounced: “eye-dee-ahn”

Benelinx’s Story: Using Ideon to seamlessly provide brokers with data from multiple carriers

“Ideon cleans up the big mess the industry has built”

With the agency management software Benelinx, employee benefits brokers access health insurance quotes from multiple carriers in a flash. The company was started by Rachel Zeman, who formerly ran a brokerage and was frustrated with the redundancies and errors that were par for the course in the space.

Here’s how she describes the traditional, broken model:

Most agencies are still running their entire business on Excel spreadsheets. If they want to make a proposal for clients, they have to go to the websites of four, five, six carriers, and upload the employee census to each, then download a quote. Then they have to compare them because every carrier’s rates and requirements are different. The only practical alternative they had was to work with a general agent that had relationships with multiple carriers, but as brokers get larger they often want to bring more in-house.

In contrast, when using Benelinx’s quoting engine, brokers have to enter a client’s parameters just once to quote and compare medical plans from numerous carriers. 

Backstage, Ideon’s APIs quietly power Benelinx’s quoting tool through seamless data exchange. (We’re the strong, silent type.) 

Read our case study to learn how Ideon helps Benelinx give brokers the data they need.

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PerfectQuote’s Story: How Ideon’s data powers the company’s small-goup quoting tool for brokers

“Ideon does all the heavy lifting—cleansing, filtering, refining all that data from carriers—and then they output a single, consistent data format that’s really easy for us to consume”

PerfectQuote is a SaaS solution for employee benefits brokers and agents, founded in 2017 on the hypothesis that there had to be an alternative to the manual spreadsheeting of benefits and rates. And indeed there was. With PerfectQuote’s software, benefits brokers in the large group space can now quote, analyze, compare, and present plans from carriers in all 50 states.

But what of the small-group space, you ask?

It’s a question PerfectQuote asked, too. Aaron Snyder, president and co-founder, shared the thought process as follows:

One of our main differentiators is that we support the large-group portion of a broker’s book of business, with plan and rate data that we get directly from carriers through broker proposals. But on the small-group side, which involves many more carriers, we didn’t have a solution that could support a broker’s entire book of business. So, like any nimble start-up, we developed our small group module and quickly figured out that Ideon could be a single source of truth for small group data, and eliminate some of the friction we experience within the other side of the platform.

Powered by Ideon, PerfectQuote now offers one of the industry’s leading small group quoting experiences. Want an inside look at how PerfectQuote expanded its platform? Download the case study here.

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Reclaim’s Story: How Ideon’s APIs saved time and reduced risk

“I think of Ideon as infrastructure-as-a-service”

Reclaim helps individuals and families manage their healthcare bills by providing a bevy of insurance-related services. The company’s app allows users to access bills, learn how they might offset costs, discover how they might have received more cost-effective service elsewhere, and more.

 Reclaim is out to simplify the insurance experience for the consumer—but they were also eager to simplify their own internal operations.

Enter Ideon’s API, an accurate and comprehensive source for provider-network data—information on which doctors and facilities participate in each insurance network.

Before Ideon we were getting data from carriers, but each one’s schema is different. That makes the ETL [extract, transform, load] process difficult because we were doing several data manipulations per carrier. Now it’s just one schema that we have to worry about—Ideon’s. 

Using Ideon also means we don’t have to worry about delays. It’s derisking for us.

So says Reclaim’s co-founder and CEO, Nataly Youssef. Interested in hearing the whole story? Download our case study here.

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Gravie’s Story: How Ideon eliminated heaps of manual work and allowed for market expansion

“Partnering with Ideon makes us a scalable solution”

For nearly a decade, Gravie has been disrupting the health insurance space through its innovative health benefits solutions, from pre-tax individual market options to its own flagship health plan, Comfort.

Since 2018, Ideon has played an important role in streamlining Gravie’s processes. Nicole Lovaas, a vice president at Gravie, shared how things looked before Ideon came on the scene:

We used data we found on healthcare.gov or from the Department of Commerce or other sources—for every state. It was very labor-intensive. We had to enter all the information we collected into Excel spreadsheets, which we then loaded into our system to display plan and rate data.

The folks at Gravie also knew that ICHRAs were going to be a big deal in 2020, and were eager to present themselves as a national solution. However, they were unenthusiastic about the multiplicity of sources that would need to be involved.

Want to learn how Gravie said sayonara to manual processes—and expanded their national reach? Get the case study here.

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Green Leaf’s Story: How API-powered carrier connectivity delivered a better client experience

“Our benefits enrollment and administration experience is light years faster”

Green Leaf Payroll & Business Solutions helps its clients in the cannabis industry streamline a wide range of payroll and HR tasks, from securing bank accounts to providing access to a suite of benefits and HR technologies.

As Green Leaf expanded its benefits solution, there was one often-requested service that it was hard-pressed to address: connectivity between an employer’s benefits software and its insurance carriers.

Hear it from them:

“We were avoiding it like the plague,” says Tyler Priest, Green Leaf’s vice president for strategic accounts. “It would take eight to 12 weeks to build carrier connections, and something would always break. Then I’d have to devote employee time and energy to fixing it that should have gone to servicing clients.” It was simpler to have the employer or its insurance broker manually fill out forms to add or change coverage and send them to the carrier.

By the start of 2021, however, potential clients started demanding the speed, efficiency, and automation of electronic connections to their carriers. “If we didn’t offer a solution,” Priest says, “we ran the risk that clients would look elsewhere.”

Researching the options, Priest found an article explaining that EDI, the technology used to connect to carriers, was being replaced, in some cases, with APIs, a modern approach that is much faster, scalable, and more accurate. He contacted Ideon, a leader in API solutions for benefits platforms, to help Green Leaf enhance its carrier connectivity capabilities.

Wondering how it went?  (Hint: This story has a happy ending.)  Download the full case study here for all the details.

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GetInsured’s Story: How Ideon saved the company time and resources—and boosted stakeholder confidence

“It’s a streamlined process when we’re working with a trusted, experienced data partner”

GetInsured powers state-based health insurance marketplaces by providing health insurance technology and customer service solutions for state governments. An important feature of the company’s offering is that consumers have the ability to shop for plans by healthcare provider, which helps individuals keep their doctors when enrolling in a new plan.

Back in the day, sourcing provider-network data was quite the headache. Says GetInsured’s director of product management, Archana Dekate:

Before Ideon we were getting our data directly from carriers or through other vendors. And each vendor had their own APIs and their own set of implementation procedures, which meant that we would have to modify our code every time to accept their data, then QA it, test it, and so on. It was time consuming; every product release would take anywhere from one to three months of setup time.

Thanks to Ideon, that’s all safely in the rearview mirror. To learn how partnering with Ideon helped GetInsured on multiple fronts, download our case study here.

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