Past Analytics Excellence Awards
Author: Jim Kunce, SVP & Chief Actuary
Company: MedPro Group
Awards Category: Best Use of Server
Describe the problem you needed to solve
MedPro Group, Berkshire Hathaway's dedicated healthcare liability solution, is the nation's highest-rated healthcare liability carrier - according to A.M. Best (A++ as of 5/27/2015). We have been providing professional liability insurance to physicians, dentists and other healthcare providers since 1899. Today, we have insurance operations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and are growing internationally. With such great size of operations and diversity of insurance products, it is a challenge to connect systems, processes and employees with one another.
Regardless of an insurance carrier's size and scale, its long-term success depends on:
- Continued new business growth
- Consistent pricing and risk-evaluation
- Unified internal operations
Our challenge was to lay the analytical foundation necessary for an ever-growing insurance company to execute on these three objectives. We identified the following three action items and linked them to the drivers of long-term success.
- Fuel new business growth by: Centralizing processes & remove system silos, link manual processes together.
- Drive consistent pricing and risk-evaluation: Remove data supply bottle-necks & empower business analysts to self-serve.
- Unify internal operations: Accelerate modernization & facilitate enterprise-wide legacy system integration.
Describe the working solution
"Fuel new business growth by centralizing processes & remove system silos, link manual processes together."
This solution has three parts to it.
- First, we programmed our pricing algorithm using Alteryx to "learn" the insurability of a prospective customer.
- Second, we overlaid this system on our CRM data to create sales recommendations nationwide.
- Third, we deployed this recommender system with our Alteryx private gallery to provide real-time access to our sales teams.
Today, from anywhere in the country, our sales personnel can request a report for a customer they are prospecting and receive a consistent, reliable recommendation in a matter of seconds with little manual intervention.
"Drive consistent pricing and risk-evaluation: Remove data supply bottle-necks & empower business analysts to self-serve."
In an insurance company, actuaries and underwriters are responsible for pricing insurance policies and evaluating insurance risks of applicants. These complex decisions rely on many data inputs - some of which are internally available, but in other cases come from external sources (e.g. government websites, third party resources).
Today, we have been able to significantly reduce the data supply bottle-necks by configuring the Alteryx server to be the bridge between the data sources and our actuaries and underwriters. Each person along the pricing and risk evaluation process now gets “analysis-ready†data consistently and timely from the private gallery, a virtual buffet of self-serve apps for all data needs.
"Unify internal operations: accelerate modernization -- facilitate enterprise-wide legacy system integration."
In 2015, MedPro Group decided to scale up investments in modernizing legacy systems to a new web-based system. The challenge was to move data from our legacy systems into the new web-based system and vice versa. Additionally, the software solution needed to have a short learning curve and be flexible and transparent enough that key business leaders managing this modernization would be able to perform the data migration tasks.
Alteryx was a great fit in this case. Not only were business leaders able to program processes in Alteryx in a relatively short timeframe, we scaled up with ease and accelerated modernization by deploying on the private server for analysts to use in a self-serve, reliable environment.
Describe the benefits you have achieved
"We have connected systems, processes and employees to one another and made the benefits of that interconnectivity available to every employee."
We have been using the private gallery and server since July, 2015. What started as a proof of concept and experiment is now a fully functional production-grade experience. The list of systems that have been connected, processes that have been automated and employees who are finding value out of our private gallery and server is growing rapidly.
Here's a view into some of the measurable benefits we have achieved in just nine months -
- 94: The number of apps published to the private gallery to date.
- 6951: The number of times an app has run on the gallery. That's 26 runs a day over 9 months!
- 15: The percentage of employees who are served with this consistent, reliable self-serve platform.
And our goal? Move that needle to 100% with Alteryx in the months to come!
