Highmark is uniting its diversified business offerings under one roof with the launch of its new Alloyed Works unit.
The Pittsburgh-based insurer said this week that the businesses included under the Alloyed Works umbrella were key to helping it grow from a plan with about 1 million members and $2.3 billion in annual revenue in the 1990s to having 7 million members and an enterprise value of $26 billion.
Solutions within the new portfolio include United Concordia Dental, which includes 9.5 million members and one of the largest dental care networks in the U.S. Other segments include post-acute care company Helion, cloud-based tech platform enGen, the stop-loss company HM Insurance Group and the third-party administrator HealthNow Administrative Services.
Deb Rice-Johnson, CEO of diversified businesses for Highmark Inc. and chief growth officer, told Fierce Healthcare that the insurer has long partnered with other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans on these services, and uniting them under a brand identity makes it easier to continue to facilitate those relationships.
"Within our footprint at Highmark, we thought we need a better way to organize and talk about this," she said, "so it doesn't just look like a hodgepodge of solutions and capabilities that we can partner with others on."
The name Alloyed Works references alloys, chemical compounds that include a metal. Rice-Johnson said the business division aims to similarly bring together different components to make something stronger.
She said the programs under Alloyed Works fall into several main buckets, such as member and provider engagement, cost management and digital health. For instance, Highmark has a long-standing relationship with Google Cloud that it can leverage in these programs for other Blues plans, Rice-Johnson said.
Smaller plans may not have the ability to build these platforms, and they're looking for partners like Highmark to fill the gaps, she said. This will become increasingly important as these more regional carriers compete with the large, national plans that have far greater resources to invest.
In addition, the Highmark team can offer insights and lessons learned as far as its own successes in customer service, managing medical cost and continuing to grow, according to the announcement.
And it's clearly resonating in the market, she said, as last year alone Highmark brought in more than $1 billion in revenue through these diversified platforms.
"It's becoming something that more and more plans are needing," Rice-Johnson said. "Some of the Blue plans are smaller, maybe can't invest, necessarily, in some of the solutions that are necessary to satisfy their market or customers."
"We're pretty excited about the framework, how it's branded and the intention behind the branding," she added.