Case Studies

Background – Moving from a regional to centralized focus

Until 5 years ago, Aetna was a regionally focused company.  Over a dozen service centers across the United States managed calls and claims for their geography.  Content had been accumulated in an alphabetical list in a random sequence of categories, which were not meaningful to the end users

Insurance is a complex business with dozens of constituents and influences including physicians, patients, labs, anesthesiologists, outpatient facilities (such as labs, x-ray, physical therapy and behavioral therapy) plus state and federal legislation. It is crucial to an insurance company’s core business that claims are processed and benefits administered following specific policies accurately. It was clear they needed a single structure to provide consistency, to search easily and provide access to content quickly

Corporate management also understood that a centralized way of handling business (and their content) was necessary to increase profitability.  As efforts began to simply workflows and business processes they began looking for an expert to guide them in the world of taxonomies, content management and search

Glenn Bair, the Project Manager, said: “We needed someone who could say to us: ‘This is how you have to look at the information that you are managing on a regular basis for the customer services reps and the people who have to administer claims.’”

Enter Earley & Associates

Glenn attended one of Seth Earley’s conference speeches where Seth demonstrated a card sorting exercise used in his taxonomy methodology.  Designed to make people think about the decisions about where they put something, Seth showed how the tool could give people a sense of the value of organizing information within taxonomy and applying a structure to that content.