Peoni

The Client

Peoni is on a mission to make affordable and predictable healthcare accessible for small businesses. With a suite of level-funded health plans to choose from that allow organizations to only pay for the healthcare services that their employees need and use, businesses can save up to 25% versus other group health plans with comparable benefits.

The Situation

MedImpact, Peoni’s parent company, wanted to create a marketplace that offered comprehensive health coverage solutions for small- to medium-sized employers. The company hoped to empower these employers through transparency, a clear value proposition, and best-in-class customer-centric experiences. The overall goal was to create a seamless user experience that streamlined finding and connecting with providers.

Specific goals included:

• Establish a digital platform that brings together all the necessary capabilities to attract brokers, general agents (GAs), and employers in the process of purchasing health coverage. 
• Launch an acquisition engine, which meant they would need to create the structure and messaging to guide key audiences (i.e., brokers, GAs, employers) through the optimal process while allowing internal teams to evolve content and functionality continuously. 
• Support the sales process and integrate digital channels to directly support sales teams by acquiring and processing leads.
• Lay the foundation to expand the site in the future, ensuring it could collect, organize, and present information while actively guiding various stakeholders through the sales process.​
• Ensure digital experiences were built to scale and would eventually facilitate the creation of a self-service portal.

The Challenge

To accomplish its goals, Peoni first needed to overcome specific business and technology hurdles. 

From a business perspective, Peoni faced the difficult task of launching its new brand into a crowded market. It had to navigate the complexities of explaining a fairly intricate concept (e.g., health plans with a level-funded approach) and convey Peoni’s unique value proposition. The company wanted to craft a visually appealing digital platform that would capture its plans’ distinctiveness and allow for a seamless user experience.

From a technology perspective, Peoni had to determine the best way to handle the large volume of network health providers to feature as part of its search and display functionality. The company wanted to create a user-friendly interface to make identifying and selecting in-network health providers easier for individuals receiving coverage.  

Another significant challenge was the need for advanced provider search refinement tools or filters to deliver an enhanced user experience with greater functionality. This would allow users to search based on their current location, specialty needed, and other criteria, such as network compatibility. Unfortunately, many of the advanced refinement tools and features Peoni needed weren’t available “out of the box.” Peoni would need a headless application to achieve an advanced, dynamic, user-friendly interface. 

Peoni wanted the site to generate awareness, acting as an entry point for employers and employees to manage their health information. 

The Solution

MedImpact partnered with Bounteous and Acquia to launch a digital-first medical coverage solution tailored for small employers. This comprehensive initiative involved the creation of the marketing website and provider finder, both built using Drupal 10 with Acquia Cloud Platform and Acquia Site Studio. The initiative also laid the foundation for Peoni to build its Broker Portal in the future. 

The project began with comprehensive discovery activities, including stakeholder interviews, workshops, and the development of personas and journey maps, feature definition and prioritization, document service and platform research, CRM platform evaluation, and the creation of sitemaps.

The teams kicked off the build phase by developing Peoni’s marketing site using Acquia Cloud Platform and Drupal 10 and creating an extensive provider search database. Managing the vast amount of data was a significant aspect of the project, requiring Drupal integration while ensuring searchability with Acquia Search. The teams established a centralized data structure, streamlining the editing of health coverage plan details in a single location to avoid inconsistencies and potential legal implications. Bounteous prioritized compliance and legal considerations, enabling clients to edit data securely and efficiently 

The use of Acquia Site Studio played a critical role in allowing the teams to achieve a consistent, easily editable site experience. Bounteous collaborated closely with Peoni to ensure the solid implementation of the design, including customized components, particularly for the plan tables, to uphold data consistency across plans.

Additionally, Bounteous integrated a React Application for the Provider Search — embedded using a custom Site Studio component — further enhancing the user experience. Due to the need for enhanced flexibility, the team opted for the hybrid headless model for the provider search  — something that was essential to create a more customized experience, including the ability to apply advanced filters to the provider search and ensure that users could easily refine their search with simplicity. Specifically, Bounteous utilized Views to generate an API endpoint that the headless application used as a data source to present search results. Drawing data from Views, the headless React application took charge of this user experience, empowering users to filter, search, and navigate the data in a user-friendly manner. 

Ultimately, this approach successfully enabled users to search for providers based on advanced filters, utilize a map view, refine results by network and plan type, and even search for specific needs or gender preferences. By adopting this approach, the teams synergistically combined the robust data organization capabilities of Views with the flexibility and advanced features of the headless application, resulting in a dynamic and user-friendly interface.

“As a digital operations leader responsible for multiple lines of business, finding the right digital transformation partner and platform for Peoni was crucial. Acquia stood out and continues to impress us with its seamless deployment and ability to launch new products quickly,” said John Celona, Vice President of Digital Innovation and eCommerce at Peoni Health. “Bounteous and Acquia serve as the engine and driving force behind our company's ability to create diverse ancillary lines of business within the health industry and drive continued success.” 

The Results

The Peoni project achieved impressive results, with a significant reduction in processing time for a large number of records. Over the course of the relationship, the processing time for approximately 11 million records was dramatically reduced from many days to just 1.5 hours, showcasing the efficiency improvements brought by the project. 

This total data set, which is synced regularly on a weekly cadence, comprises:

• Nine networks
• 248 specialties
• 1,295,705 providers
• 3,429,956 provider locations
• 4,538,613 provider network links
• 1,478,992 provider specialty links 
   

The project has seen success in other areas as well. For example, the site acquired 200 new broker partners, resulting in a substantial influx of business through a significant volume of quote requests.