Independence Blue Cross

Contact:
Independence Blue Cross
1901 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Tools Used:
CORBA, IONA's Orbix, Unix, Powerbuilder.

Benefits/Problems Solved
Independence Blue Cross has announced the use of IONA's Orbix and CORBA in two mission critical deployments, with plans for full enterprise wide deployment. Independence Blue Cross, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, administers contracts and claims covering hospital expenses, outpatient care, home care, and other institutional services. The initial CORBA-based system provides the underlying infrastructure to manage these contracts and the claims that come in through Independence Blue Cross Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system.

Requirements for the business applications are supported for both Windows and UNIX. There is also a need to support clients built with Powersoft's Powerbuilder on Windows as well as clients built on UNIX. The ability of Orbix to integrate OLE and CORBA resolved these requirements.

Independence Blue Cross provides health to more than 2.8 million members. For nearly 60 years, Independence Blue Cross has offered quality health care products and services designed specifically to meet the changing health care needs of its members. The company, with over 4700 employees, annually processes more than 5.7 million claims and responds to over 3.2 million customer inquiries.