It was a big 18-month project with its share of complex challenges. But in the end Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana believes it achieved what it set out to do: build a better and simpler-to-use web portal for plan members.

Blue Cross of Louisiana is the state’s biggest private healthcare payer. The plan has been in business since 1934 and today has 1.5 million members. Like many major commercial insurers Blue Cross of Louisiana had a website with a log-in to a portal where plan members can access their benefits and manage their account.

But with the last major redesign taking place in 2010 and only incremental updates since then, the plan’s benefits portal was slow, hard for members to use and navigate, and wasn’t working to reduce calls to the customer service center or eliminate paper, says Blue Cross of Louisiana manager of digital experience Natalie Straight.

Blue Cross of Louisiana says it took a 10-member team 18 months to design, test and implement the new plan member portal. Along the way they had to build an entirely new system architecture to handle plan member benefits, develop faster and more refined site search, and design new web pages that made it easier and simpler for users to navigate.

The newly redesigned benefits portal features fewer pages, less complex tables and charts and easier-to-find information. In crafting the blueprint for the portal redesign, Blue Cross of Louisiana staffers broke down the main website features and functions of such popular e-commerce sites as Amazon and Netflix. “We wanted a portal with more flexibility and personalization,” Straight says.

The older design featured pages with lots of tables and graphs that plan members found hard to understand. It also took multiple searches for plan members to find a claim or other information. “The old portal was not very visual,” Straight says.

The new employee benefits portal, which launched in October, features a cleaner log-in page that asks users for their user name and password, and enables them to reset both or register for an account.

Once logged in, a new account home page offers features that let plan members access corporate information, their plan information, a health savings account and a cost estimator tool. New bottom-of-the page icons give users options to click to manage their account, view statements, go paperless by signing up for electronic correspondence, and to access forms, benefits and a health assessment tool.

“The new benefits portal features a lot more education, and plan members always have a centralized view of their benefits information,” Straight says.

For example, the new account page now features clearly displayed “snap shots” of a plan member’s current medical claims, co-insurance, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. Better navigation also gives plan members options to manage their account by claims, benefits, costs, statements and pharmacy. On the same account page users can also pay bills, view and download statements, update or change an e-mail or password download or print various forms.

“A big change for the better is that claims statements are now displayed in groups of three years and grouped by episode,” Straight says. “That makes it much easier to find claims from a long time ago as opposed to having to jump back and forth through individual searches.”

A big goal of the new benefits portal is to help Blue Cross of Louisiana go entirely paperless within the next several years. For example, a frequent request from plan members was to be able to fill out an electronic form rather than printing, faxing and mailing paper. The newly updated portal features access to electronic forms including for authorized delegate such as for family members with power of attorney and other coverage questionnaire. The authorized delegate form is for members who have a need to have their benefits managed by a family member or other with power of attorney.

On the claims page, a newly added nurse “avatar” image provides explanations for billing items, such as, “This claim has more than one charge so please expand the card (image) for more detail.” Better site search lets plan members query by date range, members, providers, claims status or type. Plan members can also print claims data, export data into Excel and view by detail, or what Blue Cross calls “episode level claims data.”

A widely visited new set of pages covering plan member costs more clearly display deductibles and remaining amounts grouped by preferred or family provider, co-insurance and out-of-pocket costs grouped by the primary member or family.

The newly updated plan member portal is achieving a payback for Blue Cross of Louisiana in a number of areas, Straight says. Because employers now have the electronic means to access their annual contract for employee benefits Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn’t have to send out paper contracts that often resemble small phonebooks. By going electronic, Blue Cross of Louisiana saved more than $1 million in paper and postage, Straight says.

Traffic and use of the employee portal also is on the increase. Today about 57%, or 846,930, plan members over the age of 18 are authorized to register and use the portal. Of that total, 236,616 plan members, or 28% of all authorized members, are now using the updated portal.

In comparison, member portal usage among all of the more than 50 Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans averages 20% to 22%, Straight says.

The newly designed benefits portal is built with the technique known as “responsive design,” meaning content will adapt to fit any screen. Plus, 60,000 plan members who have downloaded Blue Cross of Louisiana’s app can use the app to gain entry to the portal, Straight says.

Redesigning the portal on its website was a big challenge, Straight says. But the launch was smooth. “In October we took the new design and portal live in the middle of a business day and with no down time,” Straight says. “Before that we likely would have cut over at three in the morning on a weekend.”