BlueCross BlueShield of SC
www.southcarolinablues.com
Columbia, S.C. – HealthNow of New York, Inc., recently announced a significant expansion of its existing partnership with BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. The upstate New York health insurance firm’s technology-based services will be hosted and administered remotely on S.C. BlueCross’ computer systems.
HealthNow staff in New York eventually will use S.C. BlueCross’ commercial data center for enrollment, billing, claims processing, national BlueCard® processing, member and provider services, utilization management, provider management and premium collection functions for more than 600,000 members.
S.C. BlueCross provides technology and back-office benefit administration services to numerous other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, including HealthNow. This agreement substantially expands on the existing relationship. Transforming HealthNow’s technology platform will be a complex task done in stages over three years. The existing S.C. BlueCross technology staff will service the account.
“This was a significant win in that we secured this business over a number of outstanding competitors, and it adds to our already extensive portfolio of technology customers and service offerings to other Blue Plans,” said Steele Pendleton, S.C. BlueCross’ senior vice president of systems sourcing. “It highlights our operational and technical capabilities as well as the positive relationship we have built with HealthNow over the years.”
The new agreement will add more than 7 million claims and 100 million transactions to S.C. BlueCross’ commercial data center. In 2011, S.C. BlueCross’ two data centers in Columbia processed 969 million claims and 25 billion transactions. They also supported more than 20 million members in commercial, Medicare and TRICARE health plans. IBM considers these data centers to be in the top 2 percent in the world in size and technology.
Headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., HealthNow (www.healthnow.org) serves members in western New York (Buffalo and surrounding counties) and Northeastern New York (Albany and surrounding counties). It is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.
Headquartered in Columbia, S.C., and operating in South Carolina for more than 65 years, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. The only South Carolina-owned and operated health insurance carrier, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina comprises more than 45 companies involved in health insurance services, U.S. DoD health program and Medicare contracts, other insurance and employee benefits services, and a philanthropic foundation that funds programs to improve health care and access to health care for South Carolinians.