Project Name:

Kitsap Physicians Service Health Insurance Quote Web Site

Project Dates: 

2002 - 2003

Project Description:

Kitsap Physicians Service (KPS) currently has a hosted corporate Web site that provides information on health care plans offered by the company. KPS wanted to expand their Web site to provide an automated on-line insurance rate quote feature for individuals and small employee groups of less than 50 employees. The goal of the new quoting site would be to streamline and standardize quoting efforts in the KPS sales department.

The rate quoting application would not only be used by potential KPS customers and insurance brokers. KPS had plans to use the new Web-based rate quoting application to generate quotes internally as well. To date, KPS had no automated way to generate rate quotes. Quotes were generated manually using a combination of Excel spread sheets and rate sheets. As a result the site would have to include features specifically designed for internal use but remain hidden from Web users.

In addition to the complex rate calculations that had to be performed, KPS also wanted to be able to re-create any quote generated via the Web site for follow-up by the sales department.  This would require all company information, census information, product selections and individual quoted rates to be stored in the database and uniquely identified. KPS had plans to migrate some systems to an Oracle platform, and requested that the database used for the application be Oracle. However, all of their rate data was stored in ISAM format and maintained via a legacy Cobol system.

The solution proposed by Paladin was to have KPS host the rate quote site in their own computer facility and link the site to their ISP hosted corporate site. Future plans would call for the moving of the entire corporate site to the KPS facility. In order to work seamlessly with the existing corporate site, the quoting site was designed with a similar look and feel so the user won’t realize that they are being transferred to another server. A series of data transfer routines were developed to move rate data from the Cobol system to the Oracle rate quote database on a periodic basis.

Paladin implemented the quoting site using a three-tier application model. The core application libraries and user interface were developed with Java and Java Server Pages (JSP) technology.

The project was a delivered on time and was such a success, that KPS was able to quote their entire small group subscriber renewals for their January 2003 renewal via the new site.

Technologies Used:

Oracle 8i, Java, Java Server Pages, HTML, DHTML, Java Script, Sun Forte, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Macromedia JRun JSP/Servlet engine

Samples: