Companion Data Services
Robust IT for Health Plans

Although technology has made inroads into every business sector, healthcare payments space has witnessed little or no innovation for a long time. At a time when health plans are striving to improve process transparency and deliver enhanced experiences to care providers and consumers, the demand for efficient healthcare information technology has reached an all-time high. Thanks to their extensive healthcare information technology expertise and experience, Companion Data Services (CDS) has disrupted the healthcare payments arena with CDS Healthcare Payer SuiteSM. The suite supports every business function that a health plan would need to provide services to consumers, providers, HR consultants, as well as insurance brokers and agents who sell plans to large groups. As the core administrative processing platform for payers, Healthcare Payer SuiteSM streamlines end-to-end processes, from enrollment to actuarial process to payments, enhancing both consumer and provider experience alike.

CDS Healthcare Payer Suite is the engine that binds every process related to claims processing. A single platform that handles all commercial lines of business, it performs just like a bank application characterized by real-time transaction features. For instance, imagine a patient walking into the doctor’s office with a health savings debit card, the patient (with access to the portal and mobile app) can quickly check for benefits and eligibility in real time and accordingly have the claims immediately processed through CDS Healthcare Payer Suite. The intuitive suite improves the convenience of its users.

As an advanced solution partner, CDS offers maximum flexibility and robustness that allow health plans to address their challenges confidently. Added to the suite, the company offers supplementary services including managed services, hosting, and security. Therefore, a health plan can simply outsource all of their technology and the infrastructure that support their backbone— be it mainframe, distributed processing, call centers, or administrative processing. The company’s services and platform are hosted in two of the largest healthcare-centric, HIPAA-certified data centers that align with all the necessary data regulations.

Further, CDS also offers back office support and provides full business process outsourcing (BPO) services. “A client can have their teams either leverage the superior functionality and the intuitiveness of our suite to perform job-related functions or have our skilled staff perform the functions on their behalf,” says Lola Jordan, President, CDS. Owned by a healthcare payer, CDS has a broader understanding of the healthcare payments market and has a longstanding partnership with different stakeholders in the arena, which gives them a competitive edge.

Citing the case of one of its partners, Avalon Healthcare providing laboratory benefits services, Lola mentions that by the time the client entered the market, they already had a unique proprietary algorithm engine to help manage laboratory claims in the ways that pharmacy benefits managers do. The client then decided to outsource the transactional processing and BPO to CDS for their rich experience in healthcare information technology. “Delighted with the CDS’ BPO service outcomes, the company has renewed their contract for the same. This has helped them improve operations and strengthen their relationship with various stakeholders of the client, including vendor, customer, and providers, all while improving ROI,” says Suzanne R. Fuller, Vice President, and Chief Solutions Officer, CDS.

The company has an exciting roadmap ahead with new partnerships lined up that will allow them to take their platform’s agile, real-time transaction capabilities across channels deeper into the market, simplifying the modern healthcare payments. With a continuous endeavor to scale the operations, the company is inking deals with commercial groups, small and large companies alike, as well as Medicare and Medicaid entities.