Current

Presently the Director of Product Development for 4myBenefits, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Primary product lines include an ETL tool to support Interchange of Benefit Data and an Affordable Care Act Reporting tool to simplify ACA compliance for Employers, providing tools for calculation, review, mailing of filings to employees, and transmission to the IRS. Manage the design, implementation and maintenance of these systems, which are used by over 300 employers nationwide, and a growing number of resellers.

ACA System

Occasionally it seems as if the Affordable Care Act reporting process was designed to deliberately highlight pain points in the Insurance Data industry. There are high levels of complexity, and a wide variety of data sources and formats, much of which falls under the scope of HIPAA. Each year, we optimize our system to better accomodate these complexities, and simplify the user experience.

The high security requirements of handling sensitive data coupled with the high performance requirements of calculating hundreds of thousands of filings, have resulted in the need for constant innovation. Notable aspects include:

• Transition from on-premise hosting to a carefully selected Secure Cloud solution.
• Minimizing the number of third-party web services consumed.
• Utilizing containerization to improve reliability and continuity across various deployment stages.
• Implementing domain-specific communication tools in the application to simplify user-experience.
• Maintaining agility, quickly adapting to change while meeting hard IRS Imposed deadlines.

ETL System

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in the insurance industry is a high complexity, high consequence endeavour. There are thousands of systems and standards used to generate and report data representing complex payroll and benefit structures.

The concept of time adds an additional layer of complexity, with various benefits and vendors handling similar data different, some accepting data when it occurs, others accepting data only when it becomes effective.

A highly flexible system with industry-specific features was needed to meet these needs. The ultimate in flexibility is a scripting tool, but such tools comes as the expense of reusability and require high user expertise.

Our system aims to be a hybrid, with much of the process completed through configuration, scripting available when needed. This broadens the pool of avaiable users and increases efficiency of those users. Notable aspects include:

• Facilitate Mapping between Entities
• Support for API and File Connections
• Data Transformations and Custom Functions
• Scheduling and Caching

Other

Additional product lines in various stages of development life-cycle include support tools for benefit enrollment business line, data lake and analysis system, and experimental machine learning applications.