TriZetto signs Netherlands marketing deal

A US company that is slowly helping to revolutionise the laborious procedure of processing claims for health insurance companies is making its largest push into Europe to date by signing a marketing deal for the Netherlands.

The TriZetto Group, a producer of software for health benefits administration, has tapped Unisys Nederland NV to market, distribute and maintain TriZetto products to Dutch health insurance organisations. The five year deal represents the first international channel partner agreement for the California based company, which already does business in Portugal, Mexico and China through its own sales force.

“This is a very different relationship here,” says TriZetto VP of strategic alliances Chuck Sanders. “This is a channel play.”

Sanders says it would take a couple of years for TriZetto to develop its own sales channel for Holland. Instead, Unisys Nederland will get TriZetto up and running there almost immediately.

“They have the long-standing relationships with health insurers in the Netherlands. They know the laws, they know the customs,” Sanders told E-Health Europe.

He adds that this partnership is intended to be a model for other international agreements. “I think Europe is a tremendous growth opportunity for us. We’re not just going to sit back and wait for an RFP,” Sanders says.

Unisys will sell three lines of TriZetto software, including the flagship, enterprise administration system for claims processing, billing of member premiums, membership administration and customer service functions. Also included in the marketing partnership is TriZetto’s add-on workflow application to automate various manual processes and a set of extensions, drivers, and adaptors for integrating the enterprise system with applications from other vendors.

“Health insurers here are taking a strategic, progressive view, wanting not just to adjudicate payments for medical services, but to help manage members’ health,” Unisys Nederland account executive Hans F. van der Zweth explains in a written statement.

TriZetto says its previous international experience means that the applications are already code-formatted for easy translation into Dutch by Unisys.

In an e-mail, van der Zweth says the partnership will include a cutting-edge system from TriZetto that facilitates real-time adjudication of claims. That system, currently in limited use in the US, permits healthcare providers to know at the point of care exactly how much of each claim will be paid by insurance so providers can collect the balance from their patients right on the spot, saving the time-consuming and expensive process of billing after the fact.

However, he says no Dutch health plan is using any TriZetto software yet.

Sanders says some of the company’s US customers are looking to bring their health insurance offerings, including plans suitable for real-time adjudication, to Europe. He declined to elaborate.