Keeping Track of Things

Contract renewals can be a tricky business for healthcare insurers, particularly for companies like Blue Shield of California, which negotiates contracts over a period of years.

“We would often get push-back from the [customers],” says Kay Kitajima, senior program manager for Blue Shield’s provider services and operations fields. “Some hospitals had better payment-tracking systems than we did, and we didn’t always have the data to go back with them and look at our records.”