Unit VI – Case Study 4

Anthem Benefits from More Business Intelligence

Anthem Inc. is one of the largest health benefit companies in the United States. One in eight
Americans receives coverage for their medical care through Anthem’s affiliated plans. Anthem
also offers a broad range of medical and specialty products, such as life and disability insurance
benefits; dental, vision, and behavioral health services; and long-term care insurance and flexible
spending accounts. Anthem is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana and earned over $90 billion
in revenue in 2017.
Anthem has been an industry leader in analyzing data to reduce fraud and waste, cultivate
customers, fine-tune its products, and keep healthcare costs low. For example, the company
analyzes the data it collects on benefit claims, clinical data, electronic health records, lab results,
and call centers to determine each person’s risk for an emergency room visit or a stroke. This
information helps the company identify opportunities for improvement and individuals who
might benefit from additional services or wellness coaching.
Now Anthem is applying its analytical skills internally to sharpen decisions about how to deploy
and develop its employees as a strategic resource. Anthem has 56,000 employees and would like
better answers to these questions: What is our employee turnover rate for call center staff in
Colorado Springs or across the United States? What is the cost of that turnover? Are we
differentiating rewards for our top performers? How many of our nurses might retire within the
next couple of years? What is the relationship between our time-to-hire metrics and national
unemployment rates?
Anthem created a cloud-based People Data Central (PDC) portal, whose interactive “workforce
intelligence” dashboard lets HR and other Anthem users access and ask questions such as these
using internal and third-party data. The portal serves 56,000 employees and presents data in
dashboards, graphs, reports, and other highly visual formats that are easy to comprehend and
manipulate.
A high-level “executive scorecard” feature explores the relationship between Human Resources
metrics and business outcomes to use in short- and long-term planning. One scorecard report
showed the relationship between customer growth, Anthem’s net hire ratio, and total costs
associated with internal and external labor. PDC provides a total of seven dashboards on “hire-
to-retire” HR operations, 50 summary views from which users can drill down into detailed
reports, and links to other relevant data and training sources.
The company also formed a Talent Insights team, whose members include MBAs, PhDs, and
CPAs, to develop more sophisticated data analysis and help users work with the data. For
example, the Talent Insights team worked with Anthem’s Wellness team to examine data on
employees who utilize company wellness credits to determine whether this could be correlated
with reduced absenteeism and employee turnover. Every month, the team looks at a different
slice of data using various indicators such as company performance, employee participation in
wellness programs, or reductions in absenteeism. For example, one month the team broke down
Anthem’s workforce by generational age bands and examined the potential ramifications for
company performance, highlighting its analysis in the portal’s “insight spotlight” section.
The PDC uses Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud and Oracle Business
Intelligence Cloud Service. Oracle HCM Cloud is the cloud-based version of Oracle tools for
Human Capital Management (human resources management), including tools for talent
management and workforce management. Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service provides
powerful data analytics tools as a cloud service that is available to anyone in the enterprise. The
service includes tools for ad hoc query and analysis, interactive dashboards, and reports.
Anthem’s Oracle-based cloud platform took less than six months to deploy.
Anthem’s human resources and talent data used to be scattered among many different systems
and spreadsheets, so they were difficult to aggregate and compare. Basic questions such as
“What is our turnover rate?” or “How many open positions do we have right now?” produced
different answers, depending on who was asked, even within the same location or work group.
To improve the HR department’s recruiting, hiring, promotion, and employee development
programs, Anthem needed better analytic tools and a single standardized enterprise-wide view of
its data.
The PDC is able to perform sentiment analysis (see Chapter 6). The portal includes a channel
where employees can voice their opinions about their work experiences confidentially, using
emojis and limited text entries. The system analyzes these ongoing sentiments to create “team
vitals” reports to help management identify and address potential productivity risks. The
company often finds information on which it can immediately take action, such as ideas for
improving processes or re-prioritizing resources.
The Anthem Talent Insights team is also helping other business groups outside of Human
Resources make better use of data. These employees from other functional business areas
typically have access only to the data for their business units. Talent Insights helps them combine
these data with HR data so they can answer questions such as how their high-potential
employees whose careers are advancing compare with those in other parts of the company. The
team developed a model that accurately predicts first-year attrition and identifies the causes of
employee turnover. Anthem management is using this information to increase employee
retention and create better profiles for future hires.

Case Study Questions:

1. Discuss the problem with the old human resources (HR) system at Anthem.
2. Describe the new People Data Central (PDC) portal adopted by Anthem. What does it do, and
how does it improve data analytics capabilities at Anthem?
3. How will the new PDC portal help the HR department make better decisions?