Below is our recent interview with Dibs Mahanta, Chief Executive Officer of Agile Health Technologies:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Agile Health Technologies?
A: Agile Health Technologies Inc. is a Healthcare Information Technology organization helping Healthcare Payers, Providers and Pharma companies in reducing operational expenses while enhancing operation efficiency. Started in 2011, with a vision of helping healthcare organizations in reducing cost of care and providing best in class healthcare services, we are helping Health Insurance companies, Care Management companies and large pharmaceuticals in enterprise solution implementation, process automations, data governance and systems integrations. Our blended delivery model with established offshore Center of Excellence offers a very flexible engagement model to suit every budget for our customers. Our healthcare business knowledge combined with our technical expertise enables us not only to deliver the best solution for our customers, but also lower the total cost of ownership. Our client portfolio ranges from large national payers to local community health plans across united states. We are also partner with large technology firms helping them executing their health technology projects.
Recommended: Trella Health Delivers Innovative Business Development Solutions for Post-Acute and Acute Care
Q: Can you give us insights into your services?
A: At Agile, we strive to improve and effectively implement innovative business solutions and processes in a diverse range of health care organizations. Our highly skilled business analysts efficiently connect the dots between user needs and technical requirements. Our solution architects work closely with businesses, ensuring the best optimized solution possible.
Advisory and Business Solution Services
With an average of 20 years of experience in health plan enterprise implementation and business process, our advisory and solution services team is knowledgeable in all business functions. At Agile, we wear the thinking hat for our customers. Business goals, constraints, pain points, and ROI expectations are the key parameters for our advisory and solution services. At Agile, we consistently track the latest technology trends and provide strategic direction to our customers and help them in keeping pace with rapid change in technological advancements.
Consulting and Strategic Staff Augmentation
Whether it is Business Integration across all business functions within the Healthcare organization or developing business transformation strategies supported by robust Business Process Management, Business Intelligence and Change Management, our consulting team steps right into organizational mission and objective to make our clients business goals a reality.
Our specialized skills in Implementation, Integration, configuration and business process includes all areas of Health Insurance such as Membership & Enrollment, Plan & Product, Benefits, Provider Networks, Accumulators, Rates, Quotes, Proposal, Claims Adjudication, Disbursement, Utilization Management, Fee Pricing, Medicaid & Medicare Programs, PBM Integration, EDI Standards such as HIPAA 5010 and 4010, X12, HL7, NCPDP etc.
Agile’s Strategic Staffing Solution helps our customers build top-notch project teams to deliver long lasting business values. In addition to our own certified healthcare professionals, we have direct access to more than 4000 healthcare professionals. We not only match our customers’ requirements, but also ensure professionals are aligned with the organizational culture and values of our customer
Managed Testing and Test Automation Services
Agile Managed Testing Service is our Testing Service framework that allows our clients on demand testing to facilitate both large enterprise level projects as well as regular monthly or quarterly production support and enhancement releases. Our testing professionals possess both healthcare business and technical knowledge and can be scaled up or down on demand, allowing our customers to meet the perennial issues of resource peaks and troughs experienced by all organizations. At Agile, with our deep functional knowledge, we not only prepare for the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with business owners, but also perform UAT execution on their behalf.
Test Automation is the path to achieving increased effectiveness and efficiency while reducing the Testing effort. At Agile, our Test Automation professionals work with our clients in defining the goals of the automation and determines the types of tests to automate in order to maximize quality benefits and best cost savings for the client. We perform complete evaluation of clients existing quality infrastructure, develop the automation topology by utilizing existing tools & techniques and identify necessary gaps. Our comprehensive 360-degree model of Test Automation plan helps healthcare organization in building a sustainable automated QA platform that is scalable and adaptable to changes. This structured method of perfecting QA automation is well supported by our Execution management, that goes beyond the project delivery to ensure necessary return on investment is achieved.
Application Management Services
We at Agile provide Application Management and Support through our robust AMS Process Framework, thereby enabling our valued customers to concentrate on their core business while we manage the information application environments. We also operate and monitor the daily batch processes needed in a health plan organization. We are experienced with various job schedulers such as Tidal, BMC, Sun Grid and Open Source schedulers and cron jobs. All our operations are highly driven by SLAs and we are committed to not only to meet but exceed the performance parameters agreed in our SLAs.
Q: What’s BenefitProTM and how does it help health plan testing budget?
A: BenefitPro™ is a complete benefit configuration testing automation solution designed and developed by our Health Plan configuration team based on their real-life experience of the past 10 years in product benefit configuration testing.
Every year, health plans configure new benefit plans or revalidate existing plans to offer the best coverage and care to their members. This is a very critical and time sensitive effort to accurately design benefit plans and test them on time to meet the open enrollment or enrollment renewal timelines. Any delay in this effort may impact thousands of members, their families and cause a huge dent on the positive consumer experience. The intensity and volume of this effort peaks before the open enrollment period in October. Many health plans employ hundreds of temporary resources during this period to complete the benefit testing on time for open enrollment. Due to this largely manual effort, the testing cycle, defect fix and retesting becomes very cumbersome and error prone, often leading to delay or a longer open enrollment period. This impacts the member experience as well as diminishes employee morale. The BenefitPro™ automates this process and reduces the overall effort to validate the accuracy of all benefit plans, while maintaining highly efficient and quality testing. This enables the configuration team and testers to assess and retest fixes more efficiently. BenefitPro™ saves health plan testing budgets thousands of dollars by reducing testing time and manual effort while delivering higher efficiency.
Q: Who are your clients and what are some of the key challenges you’re helping them solve?
A: Our clients are the Health Plan organizations, Care Management organizations, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, Healthcare providers, Accountable care organizations and pharma companies. We have detailed case studies and success stories from these customers. I am providing a brief of few such examples –
The challenge was to streamline the delivery process and integrate multiple vendor deliverable in a short period of time for a PBM migration project at a large Health Plan. Agile team was successful in not building the implementation plan and coordinating with multiple vendors, but also complete the implementation and go live on time within budget.
Successfully developed a FACETS Testing Center of Excellence for a large Health Plan in east coast in blended-shore delivery model. Utilizing flex and on demand sourcing, we were able to eliminate administrative overheads, project slack times and reduce the over all testing operating cost while “follow the sun” model of delivery increased efficiency and improved delivery timelines.
Implemented client sentiment analysis process for a large pharma company through automated data collections and analysis from multiple sources and web. The solution helped the client in accurate analysis of market trends and customer sentiment and able to develop successful customer retention strategy.
Multiple strategic business acquisition lead to the need for streamlining business processes across many disparate systems performing redundant functions for a large national health plan. Our Agile health plan analysts and consultants helped the client in transforming their government business with seamless integration of microservices, business processes and data.
Recommended: Trella Health Delivers Innovative Business Development Solutions for Post-Acute and Acute Care
Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
A: The Healthcare industry is persistently working on finding ways to improve patient care and reduce the cost. The CIOs are constantly challenged to analyze multiple terabytes of data to find different ways to reduce cost of Healthcare and develop new ways to deliver patient care. In this pursuit of excellence in Healthcare, the emerging technologies such Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are playing a pivotal role. While adopting new technology, automation and system overhaul are usual option, the overall success of the organization depends on their ability to review and continuously optimize business processes and making them simpler for their users and more efficient. At Agile, we are working on building our capabilities for these next generation technologies and develop the perfect blend of Healthcare domain and emerging technology expertise. While all these new and expensive technologies provide a big promise, the success depends on identifying and prioritizing key areas to implement such technology, backed by a robust implementation plan and guaranteed by post implementation follow up and corrective action to achieve the business objective. Our goal is to become a trusted partner of our customers and help them in their healthcare technology transformation journey.
