BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota Case Study

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is the largest health care provider in the state of Minnesota. They promote a wider, more economical and timely availability of health services for the people of Minnesota, and have remained true to that mission for nearly 70 years.

accessBlue is a web-based application developed by Blue Cross to dramatically improve providers access to membership information, claims, case history, referrals and benefits. accessBlue was deployed for live operation in 1998 and currently supports an online user base of over 2,600 users.

“JNetDirect solutions are our tools of choice for database access to our mainframe based legacy systems,” said Shawn Pearson, accessBlue project manager. “After evaluating a number of JDBC products, we chose NetDirect because it was a cost-effective, all Java driver, that was rated highly by Sun Microsystems.”

“In addition, it will provide our application with the increased scalability required to meet the growth of our user base. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota looks forward to working with NetDirect technology on many of our future projects as we move forward using the Java platform for this and other applications”.

The technical challenges that faced the project have been many, however the ability to manage server memory has been a critical problem for accessBlue. By choosing a robust and scalable JDBC driver, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota now feel confident to expand its user base to allow more providers to access the system.

The accessBlue application has been very successful because it has significantly reduced calls to customer service representatives and allowed for much quicker access to member information. Using JNetDirect products in live deployment, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is now enjoying both improved reliability and scalability for its Java applications.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, with headquarters in the St. Paul suburb of Eagan, covers nearly 2 million members through its health plans or plans administered by its affiliated companies. Blue Cross is Minnesota’s oldest and largest health plan and began operations in 1933. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, headquartered in Chicago.