Physicians Insurance
A Fully Integrated Drupal Website
Physicians Insurance A Mutual Company was founded in 1981 under the auspices of the Washington State Medical Association. Physicians believed then, as they do now, that they would get better service and outcomes from a company that they owned, rather than from a giant, national firm with no local presence. Today, Physicians Insurance serves more than 8,500 physicians, practices, and hospitals in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, and provides risk-management consulting, continuing medical education, and claims administration services. The company has grown and has strategically diversified its geographic footprint, now writing business across 42 states.
The website is an important strategic and functional tool for members to review claims, download certificates of insurance, review their policy data, and access various support resources. The site is used to deliver value to members, is an important piece of IT infrastructure, and enables the company’s marketing and communication tools.
Drafting the Project Blueprint
Complex projects always start with full team scoping sessions where we workshop the project details. This gives us an early chance to work together, develop an itemized set of integration points, discuss content plans, implement a marketing strategy, coordinate IT, and nail down infrastructure requirements. We were given an administrator's tour of the existing website, and discovered ways to improve on the experience. We discussed the user experience, administrative experience, and the brand with their internal design team. We diagrammed interconnected systems, data flows, registration and login flows between systems.
This scoping and drafting phase is what defines the details of the work. They also establish the working relationship and communication approach - the soft skills that make a project run well.
Scaled for Content
In addition to using the Physicians Insurance website to access their account information, members can also take advantage of educational resources, communicate with consultants, and process and track claims. To directly manage a large amount of content, some of it gated depending on the user type, Physicians Insurance needed a website capable of supporting their content strategy. Physicians Insurance had been, in part, managing their website directly by writing content in HTML. To make this process easier, we built their new website on a fresh install of Drupal CMS.
We manually migrated all content to the new website, collaborating with Physician Insurance’s designer to perfect the layout and content coordination. The Physicians Insurance site contains advanced submission forms that needed to be rebuilt. We made sure all forms were consistent in style and UX across the website. Content layouts are now responsive, built to resize according to a user’s device.
Managing Gated Resources
Gated content is managed from the Drupal admin. This includes Physicians Insurance’s resource library, courses, articles, insurance information, and additional educational resources. Their Drupal admin has been constructed to manage the various types of resource content, which can include anything from PDF’s to Word Docs to hosted and embedded videos.
Custom Features
Integrating With a Custom Enterprise System
Physicians Insurance manages its policy information through an internal system in addition to utilizing a separate CRM tool. In order to connect these internal systems to their Drupal website, we needed API’s to communicate data between the various systems. The rebuild of Physicians Insurance’s website coincided with the construction of new API’s, which were passed to our team to connect to their Drupal website.
With this level of integration, subscriber data is now automatically passed through to their new website, pre-populating forms with member information.
Tokenized Authentication
Some resources accessed through the Physicians Insurance website - educational courses, employee resources - redirect to external websites. To manage this, we built a tokenized authentication process which allows the system to recognize and permit the user automatically.
Ready to Launch
After weeks of careful collaboration and construction, Physicians Insurance launched in February 2019.
