Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and NASCO Complete Multi-year Migration Initiative

ATLANTA, Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) has long used NASCO for its national business, but several years ago, the Plan began collaborating with NASCO on a multi-year migration initiative, the Michigan Operating System (MOS), to use the NASCO Processing System (NPS) and MembersEdge^® solution for its individual, local and national business.

Creating a new operating system is no small task, especially for a company the size of BCBSM, but after a multi-year migration effort that included successes, challenges and plenty of lessons learned, the MOS program successfully migrated its final contracts from BCBSM to NASCO last month, for a grand total of over 1.5 million local contracts migrated. In 2008, NASCO supported 2.1 million members on behalf of BCBSM. After the completion of the MOS migration, that number more than doubled. Today, NASCO supports 4.7 million BCBSM members.

"Remediating systems often is a heavy financial burden for Plans, especially when there are numerous systems involved. NASCO's proven, single-system solution leverages true economies of scale, which provides great value to Plans, especially in these times of market variability," said John Ladaga, President and CEO of NASCO. "When we partnered with BCBSM several years ago, we knew that this multi-year migration would be no easy task, but we also knew that NASCO and BCBSM were up to the challenge. Now that the MOS program is complete, we can already see the tremendous benefits and value the Plan has been able to realize."  

While most of 2007 and 2008 focused on the system enhancements, testing, training and migration planning required for the MOS, NASCO and BCBSM reached a number of key milestones in 2009, and completed the MOS small group migration pilot in 2010 along with a pilot migration of large and complex groups, bringing the 2010 total migrated contract count to nearly 40,000. Over 275,000 contracts migrated during 2011, and 2012 yielded an impressive 736,791 contracts migrated. 

"For us, moving to NASCO was clearly the right choice. We started with a good portion of our business on NASCO — our national accounts. We knew the system, we knew the organization and the people, and we were confident that the system would meet our needs and that NASCO as an organization would be able to deliver," stated Joe Hohner, Executive Vice President, Health Care Value and Information Technology of BCBSM. "This move was clearly the right answer. I don't know how we could accomplish what we need to do for healthcare reform if we hadn't pursued the MOS program. Sitting here today, I can't think of anything else that would have served us better."

NASCO provides a highly configurable system that can be suited to fit any Plan's book of business, including all market segments. The company continually invests in capabilities to ensure that its Plan customers remain competitive and aligned with changing market demands. And as its Plan customers migrate more and more of their business onto the NPS, they can rest assured because they know that NASCO is committed to the reliability, scalability and operational performance to which they are accustomed.

About NASCO
NASCO provides information technology solutions to Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans across the nation. Celebrating 25 years of service, this Atlanta-based company's single-system solution is designed to ensure that Plan members' insurance claims are paid accurately and efficiently. NASCO was founded in 1987 to provide an integrated membership and claims processing system for national accounts. Today, NASCO's capabilities extend to include support for individual, local and government accounts while its multitude of performance-based services help its Plan customers improve their operational efficiencies and reduce costs. NASCO, owned by several Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans, has processed over 1 billion claims and is unsurpassed in the market for reliability, flexibility, scalability and operational performance. For more information, visit www.nasco.com.

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, a nonprofit organization, provides and administers health benefits to more than 4.4 million members residing in Michigan in addition to members of Michigan-headquartered groups who reside outside the state. The company offers a broad variety of plans including Community Blue^SM, Simply Blue^SM and Healthy Blue Incentives^SM PPOs; Blue Care Network HMO; BCN Healthy Blue Living^SM; Flexible Blue^SM plans compatible with health savings accounts; Medicare Advantage; Part D Prescription Drug plans; and MyBlue^SM products in the under-age-65 individual market. BCBSM also offers dental, vision and hearing plans. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Blue Care Network are nonprofit corporations and independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. For more company information, visit bcbsm.com.

SOURCE NASCO