HMSA Standardizes on Documentum

Following up on its initial Documentum implementation last May, the Hawaii Medical Service Association has standardized on the Documentum ECM platform to manage enterprise content and is integrating Acartus' ApertureOne to implement a comprehensive, integrated report management solution.

Honolulu-based HMSA, a member of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (Chicago), originally deployed Documentum as a point solution for its claims and membership services departments, according to Linda Bilek, senior project manager, HMSA. "It was not until we had implemented pilots for both departments that we took a good, long look to determine whether Documentum could indeed provide an enterprise-wide solution for us," she says. Having decided that it could so, she adds, "We started looking at tools that could interface with I t-- for all our document and data capture products, we're looking for very tight integration with Documentum."

HMSA was in need of a new report management system because its existing system was no longer supported by the vendor and lacked a Web interface, according to Bilek. "The fact that ApertureOne was designed specifically to integrate Acartus' product with Documentum gave it an edge," in the selection process, she says.

The combined Acartus/Documentum solution will enable HMSA to archive, index, manage and quickly access enterprise reports and other computer-generated content directly from a centralized Documentum database and allow reports from other enterprise applications to be easily imported to Documentum, managed as content and distributed to users, according to Documentum.

Says Bilek, "ApertureOne allows our internal customers to now use Documentum's Web browser-based tool to retrieve reports along with the other kinds of content they have been using the solution for over the last year." The Acartus component thus addresses two important business needs, she explains. "One is [that] it enables us to move from an unsupported system to one that is very much supported; the second is [that] it allows us to cut storage costs because [the ApertureOne solution] takes about half the space to store the documents as the current system."

The ApertureOne solution will go live before July 15, according to Bilek.

Since HMSA has an abundance of other document management-related projects to tackle, the carrier is taking a step back to plan how best to integrate future solutions to its chosen document/content management platform, Bilek relates. "We are working with Documentum to take a look at our architecture to make sure that we really have developed an enterprise-level architecture so that all types of touch points, imports and exports can be maintained, and that it remains scalable and reliable for us."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio