SKYGEN Connects Specialty Benefits Insurers with their Data

For health insurers on the path to becoming data-driven, business intelligence is foundational. Business intelligence creates high-quality insights insurers can use to drive business growth, increase operational efficiency, and enhance member experiences and outcomes more effectively. SKYGEN’s Enterprise System Data Warehouse helps specialty benefits clients implement business intelligence strategies. In this blog, Lisa Rivera-Fowles, Director, Analytics Product Management at SKYGEN, shares her insights on business intelligence trends in specialty benefits. 

Q: Why is SKYGEN making it a priority to put data into the hands of clients?
Lisa Rivera-Fowles: Data is how our clients are transforming themselves as organizations, and as their partner, we want to help them use their data to get a holistic view of their business. We’re providing customizable, on-demand data in dashboards that executives and managers can use in their daily work, whether that’s analyzing cost and outcomes or managing day-to-day operations. Business leaders at all levels need data to make important, real-time decisions for the good of their members and their business.

Q: Is this simply more advanced reporting?
Lisa Rivera-Fowles: Business intelligence is much broader than that, and more useful. In the past, data was an afterthought. The way it is generated, accessed and used by organizations hasn’t been considered when they are developing initiatives or processes. Business intelligence goes well beyond reporting to integrate actionable data in business strategies and inform decision-making on an everyday basis. It’s how organizations become data-driven.  

Organizations on the journey to becoming data driven are putting data governance policies in place. They’re improving data literacy by training their teams. The goal is data democratization – where everyone in the organization feels comfortable accessing and using data and business intelligence in their work.   

Q: How does SKYGEN accommodate clients’ varied data needs?
Lisa Rivera-Fowles: Our clients are at different stages in their data journey, and they’re also taking different approaches to business intelligence. We’re intentionally flexible in the ways clients can connect with us to use their data.

Q: Can you share an example?
Lisa Rivera-Fowles:  Sure, I can give you a few.  We have many technically-advanced SaaS clients that use licensed tools to report against data housed in their data centers. Some of these clients want control of how and when their data arrives from us. They don’t want to wait, so we make sure these clients can pull data on-demand. Others have less desire for control of data arrival, and for these clients, we push data to the destination of their choice. For clients that don’t already have or want to implement third-party tools, we’re developing our own standard business intelligence tools they’ll soon be able to use for developing their own custom reports.  

This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. We work with clients to help them use their data in way that makes sense for them.

Q: What does robust access to data mean for our clients?
Lisa Rivera-Fowles: So many good things! Big picture, this allows our clients to bring their specialty benefits data into their own data solution. That has a lot of advantages, including enabling clients to integrate specialty benefits data with their medical health data. On the day-to-day level, improved access to data enables our clients to have a single source of truth for specialty benefits data. They don’t have to spend time wondering why reports don’t match. 

Being able to use their data for decision-making allows them to get a better handle on the complexity of benefit management. Our goal is to make data effective so our clients can use it for the benefit of their members and their business.   

If you’d like to learn more about SKYGEN’s Enterprise System Data Warehouse and business intelligence solutions, get in touch with us today.