The Thrill of the Blog

John (our founder & CEO) and I had a meeting this morning with a visionary insurance carrier to discuss their interest in leveraging our integrated suite of services to empower them to provide full-service COBRA administration for all of their policy holders.  Two fun, first time, results occurred for me.

First, I got to say for the first time in a conversation, “I wrote about just this topic in my blog last night.”  Secondly, they reaffirmed across the board their agreement with my post.

This carrier intends to provide COBRA compliance administration for all of their policy holders’ members’ plans — not just their own.  In other words, Carrier A will be administering COBRA for Carrier B, C, and D’s plans.  The question they asked was, “How will the COBRApoint system enable us to communicate eligibility changes to other carriers?”  Before I could stop myself, I was self-identifying myself as a blogger.

The good news (I think) is that they agreed that the only universally accepted solution we could offer today is faxes.  The better news is that they agreed that they’d be happy to work with us to begin to help us convince the carriers they’ll be communicating with to accept EDI files from us.  I hope WEDI influences the universal adoption of a common standard before we build a library of custom file formats for every carrier in the country, but if we have to build this wall one brick at a time, we will.