Ascential Software Helps UICI Student Insurance Make Strategic Decisions Based on Better Business Information
Tuesday October 21, 9:00 am ET
Specialty Insurer Uses Ascential's Enterprise Data Integration Suite To Speed Employee Access to Member, Claims and Premium Data
WESTBORO, Mass., Oct. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ascential Software Corporation (Nasdaq: ASCL - News), the enterprise data integration leader, today announced that UICI Student Insurance, a division of UICI (NYSE: UCI - News), has deployed the Ascential(TM) Enterprise Integration Suite to better compete in the youth and young adult health insurance market. UICI Student Insurance will give actuaries, underwriters and executives dramatically improved access to the company's membership, premium and claims information. Enhanced access will help the company more effectively manage risk and profits based on emerging trends and up-to-the-minute information.
"UICI Student Insurance created an enterprise data warehouse that uses technology from Ascential Software to consolidate data from existing information systems and a new claims processing system," said Bruce Bradley, chief actuary of UICI Student Insurance. "The result is a unified source for critical premium, exposure and claim information as well as a solid infrastructure for enterprise applications. Consequently, we have accelerated our core business processes by generating daily reports for underwriters and setting prices for actuaries. Executives can readily obtain current loss ratios, a constantly changing metric that measures profitability." This is a significant change from the past, when employees had limited data access and long waits for paper reports that were difficult to analyze.
UICI Student Insurance provides health insurance to 350,000 students through 400 colleges and generates approximately $200 million in annual premiums. The company is using the Ascential DataStage® data transformation solution to consolidate information from a wide variety of UICI Student Insurance applications into a data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server running on the Windows NT operating system. The source applications include a new claims processing system running on an IBM AS/400 server and a DOS-based legacy claims processing system.
The company is also using Ascential ProfileStage(TM) to analyze legacy systems and profile source data, and Ascential QualityStage(TM) to cleanse, match and deduplicate incoming data such as provider contact information. These processes are essential to the success of ongoing and future data integration initiatives.
"Health insurance is very competitive, and incisive business information lets us compete more effectively," said Rick Doucette, UICI Student Insurance's CIO. "Although we've been successful with our paper-based reporting system, we're now looking to gain an edge that will help us succeed when we get into competitive pricing situations, which is most of the time. We now have a whole new level of access that we didn't have before. When our underwriters see a number they don't understand, such as a certain loss ratio, they'll be able to dig down and get at what's really going on behind that number."
UICI Student Insurance chose Ascential Software earlier this year from among five companies that responded to an initial request for proposals. UICI Student Insurance defined Ascential Software's advantage as its end-to-end enterprise data integration solution, unmatched linear scalability, value, and several other technical considerations.
UICI Student Insurance will be able to improve performance in the future by extending information access selectively to customers and across the entire UICI Student Insurance organization. In fact, the company CEO is using warehouse data to manage the company from his desktop.
"Competition in the health insurance industry makes it extremely important for insurers to extract the highest possible value of business information from the terabytes of data they have locked in various formats across their multiple legacy systems," said Mark Register, Ascential Software vice president and chief marketing officer. "Better information means better decisions, which can make the difference between profit and oblivion. Student Insurance is emblematic of this imperative and is intelligently applying our technology to expand its lead on the competition."
Idea Integration was the systems integrator for UICI Student Insurance.
About Idea Integration
Idea Integration is an e-business consulting and systems integration solutions provider serving Fortune 1000 companies, government, and middle- market clients. Specializing in Web design and development, information management solutions, wireless workflow applications, portal solutions, and enterprise resource management, Idea delivers high-return business applications for its clients. Idea serves clients throughout the United States and United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.idea.com.
About UICI Student Insurance
UICI Student Insurance is one of the nation's largest providers of student health plans, with over 40 years of experience. UICI Student Insurance is a division of The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of UICI. UICI's annual revenues are over $1 billion and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, symbol UCI.
About Ascential Software
Ascential Software Corporation is the leading provider of enterprise data integration solutions to organizations worldwide. Customers use the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite to integrate and leverage data across all transactional, operational, and analytical applications with confidence in the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of critical information. Ascential Software's powerful data profiling, data quality, data transformation, parallel processing, meta data and connectivity solutions enable customers to reduce total cost of ownership and increase return on IT investment. Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., Ascential Software has offices worldwide and supports more than 3,000 customers in such industries as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, and government. More information on Ascential Software can be found on the Web at www.ascential.com.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release contains forward-looking statements based on current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events, and these statements are subject to important factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this release address a variety of subjects including, for example, the functionality, characteristics and performance capabilities of Ascential's products and technology, the ability of Ascential's customers to improve performance by extending information access selectively to customers and the ability of Ascential's customers to utilize Ascential's products to analyze legacy systems and profile source data as well as to cleanse, match and duplicate incoming data such as provider contact information. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements: risks relating to the ability of Ascential to expand its market share, growth rates for the enterprise data integration software market, the scope and frequency of data integration projects, integration/divestiture issues resulting from merger/acquisition activities, general business conditions in the software industry, the technology sector, and in the domestic and international economies, rapid technological change in the markets served by Ascential, dependence on international operations, and difficulties that Ascential may experience integrating technologies, operations and personnel of completed or future acquisitions. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to the filings made by Ascential with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, the most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Ascential disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements made herein to reflect any change in Ascential's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which such statements are based.
Ascential is a trademark of Ascential Software Corporation or its affiliates and may be registered in the United States or other jurisdictions. Other marks are the property of the owners of those marks.
Source: Ascential Software Corporation |
