Cambia – Rapid prototyping

Created a rapid prototyping engine to develop ideas into products in as little as 90 days

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Challenge

Cambia needed to infuse its development organization with the skills and knowledge to rapidly ideate and iterate to bring consumer-centric products to market faster with greater quality.

Outcome

Catalyte infused a “fail fast” iterative development mentality into Cambia’s IT organization while creating user-centric applications that compiled multiple data streams and made decision making processes (for members, employees and executives) easier.

Cambia Health Solutions, a family of over 20 healthcare companies that empower more than 70 million Americans nationwide, wanted to be more agile and speed time to market for new product ideas. It wanted to do this while facing the challenge of increasing digital demand from consumers and changing healthcare mandates as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Having worked with Catalyte on previous projects, Cambia knew how quickly our technologists could ramp up and their proficiency in agile methodologies, cloud technologies and user-centric design.

Getting people to care about health plans

BridgeSpan Health is an affiliate of Cambia Health Solutions. Catalyte developed its original product, a web-based interface for consumers to research and better understand available health plans.

With the success of that product, BridgeSpan reengaged Catalyte to help consumers go a step further in their research and see what type of health plans people like them had selected. This CDO Finder would aggregate data from BridgeSpan, present it to consumers and help guide them in their decision-making process.
Three Catalyte engineers designed and developed a prototype in around 90 days. They met this timeline despite a tech stack (AWS, React.js and node.js) that was new to BridgeSpan and a new AWS environment.

Catalyte not only delivered the product on time, but also helped to change the BridgeSpan/Cambia culture to be more iterative and agile. This transformation paved the path for future rapid prototyping projects.

Improving customer service one data stream at a time

Cambia’s customer service relied on multiple, disparate databases to gather member information. These databases had to be viewed separately, making resolution of member issues more difficult and time consuming. Cambia tasked Catalyte to create a prototype that would present all relevant member information in an easily accessed and understood user interface (UI) for customer service reps.

Because of the rapid nature of the project, and unclear requirements inherent in the prototype specs, many iterations were needed in a short period of time. To meet project deadlines, Catalyte engineers employed AWS, built out a new UI with React.js and used APIs (uncommon for Cambia’s IT organization) to build the web application.

Understanding 5000 employee concerns

Using SharePoint, Cambia’s executives were only able to access employee and member feedback when they were connected to office networks. This limited their ability to understand, triage and respond to issues in real time.

To solve this issue, Catalyte migrated the SharePoint data to a web application for easier accessibility. Ten Catalyte engineers completed the project in approximately three months.

Beyond the migration and development of the web app, Catalyte enhanced the user experience by creating easier to use interfaces and showing executives with busy schedules the actionable information they needed to make decisions. They can now review and respond to inquiries and comments at any time from any place.

Key takeaways

Rapid prototyping
Demonstrated ability to take an idea from conception to deployment in 90 days.
Cloud deployment
Introduced AWS skills and application deployment to Cambia’s IT organization.
User-centric design
Incorporated UI into rapid prototyping to create products that were easier and more intuitive to use.
Data management
Connected disparate data pools into centralized stream to present information in a single application interface.
Iterative process change
Changed the mindset of Cambia’s IT organization to focus more on speed, agile and a “fail fast” mentality.

Key technologies/skills

  • ReactJS
  • Node.js
  • AWS
  • InVision wireframing
  • APIs
  • Agile development

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