4 page case study UVI
Anthem Benefits from More Business Intelligence

Anthem Inc. is one of the largest health benefit companies in the United States. One in eight Americans receives coverage for their medical care through Anthem’s affiliated plans. Anthem also offers a broad range of medical and specialty products, such as life and disability insurance benefits; dental, vision, and behavioral health services; and long-term care insurance and flexible spending accounts. Anthem is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana and earned over $90 billion in revenue in 2017.

Anthem has been an industry leader in analyzing data to reduce fraud and waste, cultivate customers, fine-tune its products, and keep healthcare costs low. For example, the company analyzes the data it collects on benefit claims, clinical data, electronic health records, lab results, and call centers to determine each person’s risk for an emergency room visit or a stroke. This information helps the company identify opportunities for improvement and individuals who might benefit from additional services or wellness coaching.

Now Anthem is applying its analytical skills internally to sharpen decisions about how to deploy and develop its employees as a strategic resource. Anthem has 56,000 employees and would like better answers to these questions: What is our employee turnover rate for call center staff in Colorado Springs or across the United States? What is the cost of that turnover? Are we differentiating rewards for our top performers? How many of our nurses might retire within the next couple of years? What is the relationship between our time-to-hire metrics and national unemployment rates?

Anthem created a cloud-based People Data Central (PDC) portal, whose interactive “workforce intelligence” dashboard lets HR and other Anthem users access and ask questions such as these using internal and third-party data. The portal serves 56,000 employees and presents data in dashboards, graphs, reports, and other highly visual formats that are easy to comprehend and manipulate.

A high-level “executive scorecard” feature explores the relationship between Human Resources metrics and business outcomes to use in short- and long-term planning. One scorecard report showed the relationship between customer growth, Anthem’s net hire ratio, and total costs associated with internal and external labor. PDC provides a total of seven dashboards on “hire-to-retire” HR operations, 50 summary views from which users can drill down into detailed reports, and links to other relevant data and training sources.

The company also formed a Talent Insights team, whose members include MBAs, PhDs, and CPAs, to develop more sophisticated data analysis and help users work with the data. For example, the Talent Insights team worked with Anthem’s Wellness team to examine data on employees who utilize company wellness credits to determine whether this could be correlated with reduced absenteeism and employee turnover. Every month, the team looks at a different slice of data using various indicators such as company performance, employee participation in wellness programs, or reductions in absenteeism. For example, one month the team broke down Anthem’s workforce by generational age bands and examined the potential ramifications for company performance, highlighting its analysis in the portal’s “insight spotlight” section.

The PDC uses Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud and Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service. Oracle HCM Cloud is the cloud-based version of Oracle tools for Human Capital Management (human resources management), including tools for talent management and workforce management. Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service provides powerful data analytics tools as a cloud service that is available to anyone in the enterprise. The service includes tools for ad hoc query and analysis, interactive dashboards, and reports. Anthem’s Oracle-based cloud platform took less than six months to deploy.

Anthem’s human resources and talent data used to be scattered among many different systems and spreadsheets, so they were difficult to aggregate and compare. Basic questions such as “What is our turnover rate?” or “How many open positions do we have right now?” produced different answers, depending on who was asked, even within the same location or work group. To improve the HR department’s recruiting, hiring, promotion, and employee development programs, Anthem needed better analytic tools and a single standardized enterprise-wide view of its data.

The PDC is able to perform sentiment analysis (see Chapter 6). The portal includes a channel where employees can voice their opinions about their work experiences confidentially, using emojis and limited text entries. The system analyzes these ongoing sentiments to create “team vitals” reports to help management identify and address potential productivity risks. The company often finds information on which it can immediately take action, such as ideas for improving processes or re-prioritizing resources.

The Anthem Talent Insights team is also helping other business groups outside of Human Resources make better use of data. These employees from other functional business areas typically have access only to the data for their business units. Talent Insights helps them combine these data with HR data so they can answer questions such as how their high-potential employees whose careers are advancing compare with those in other parts of the company. The team developed a model that accurately predicts first-year attrition and identifies the causes of employee turnover. Anthem management is using this information to increase employee retention and create better profiles for future hires.

Sources: Rob Preston, “People Data Central,” Profit Magazine, Winter 2018; Michael Singer, “Anthem Prescribes Oracle Analytics for Talent Lifecycle,” blogs.oracle.com, February 26, 2018; www.antheminc.com, accessed April 24, 2018; and Jennifer Bresnick, “Borrowed from Retail, Anthem’s Big Data Analytics Boost Member Engagement,” HealthIT Analytics, August 4, 2017.

Case Study Questions

1. Why did Anthem need better data and analytics tools for Human Resources? What management, organization, and technology factors contributed to Anthem’s need for better HR data and analytics?

2. Describe the business intelligence capabilities of the PDC portal.

3. What groups in the company benefited from Anthem’s new analytics tools? Explain your answer.

4. How did Anthem’s new data analytics capabilities change the Human Resources function at the company?