Premera's foundation for content

Premera Blue Cross' four public Web sites, seven portals, company intranet and HIPAA document repository are being powered by Stellent Universal Content Management. In addition to improving productivity and customer service, the new system is said to have helped Premera cut printing and shipping costs.

Native-format contribution and automatic Web content conversion capabilities enable each of Premera's departments (down to the business users themselves) to "own" their portions of the company's intranet. Plus, a few departments contribute content to the company's public Web sites, Stellent reports in a recent news release.

Dave Young, VP of IT applications, technology services and e-business for Premera, explains that the company chose the solution for two reasons. "First the open architecture provides a single platform and interface to develop extended applications. Second, we can use the system to easily distribute content ownership and Web publishing responsibilities to business users through workflow automation—keeping our Web presence up-to-date and on-brand," he says.

By giving content ownership to business users, Premera's IT department can focus on projects that are more complicated than updating Web pages with minor content changes. Web-based templates and a formalized workflow process ensure that the sites that employees create and update are consistent with corporate messaging and branding requirements.

Premera also uses the solution's records and retention management capabilities to manage documents related to meeting requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). And Premera is piloting the solution's really simple syndication (RSS) features to enable its communications department to more easily update the rest of the company on industry news.

Premera is a health benefits company with more than 1.6 million members in the western part of the country. Oracle has announced its intent to buy Stellent.