An Equal Partnership Between Tech and Business

How Oscar’s tech and business teams work hand-in-hand

At Oscar, our business and tech teams are equally critical to our mission: to serve as the entrypoint to high-value health care and provide a best-in-class user experience for our members. We are not just an insurance company, we are also a tech company, and these elements together enable us to guide our members to the best care, reduce costs, and improve quality in health care. Here, building an effective partnership between our tech and business teams is essential.

It is important to note that Oscar is a full-stack insurance company, which means that we build all of our systems in-house and control not only our consumer, provider, and broker-facing websites and apps, but also our back-end technology and operational systems. This gives us complete ownership over all of our data and tech products, which in turn grants us greater flexibility to build products and features that we otherwise would not be able to.

It also means that our business teams, which handle everything from contracting with hospitals and doctors, to providing unrivaled Concierge service for our members, to overseeing and managing the health of our member population, to making sure claims are processed in an accurate and timely manner, rely on the software our tech teams create to do their jobs.

Like many early stage companies, then, we face one core constraint: how do we balance our limited technology resources with our ever-expanding aspirations?

Our strategy is to approach technology development in a way that makes it faster and easier to optimize our operations, engage our users, and figure out what works. The best way to do that is to enable self-service for our non-engineering colleagues, allowing them to use the tools we build to solve their own problems with little intervention from engineers. This not only gives the engineering team more bandwidth and breathing room, but also allows our business teams to move forward more effectively on their own, without waiting for help from “IT.”

Consider the alternative. Because we move fast and have so many internal and external end users, if our engineers were to focus on solving one business problem at a time, we’d move at a snail’s pace relative to our goals. To prevent this from happening, we approach product development in a different way, looking across all areas to identify patterns and common needs, then building generic and flexible solutions that address many use cases at once. Perhaps most critically, we empower our business colleagues to perform semi-technical operations and control their own destiny. Flexibility, modularity and self-service are now the central themes driving our efforts.

Key to these efforts is our own self-service configuration platform, which we call Automat (named for the fast food restaurants where people serve themselves from vending machines). Automat hooks into all of Oscar’s data sets — from providers, claims, in-app messaging, brokers, etc. — and allows semi-technical users on our business teams to define their own triggers (we call them recipes) that generate various actions, such as creating an internal task, or sending an external secure message or email.

For example, if a concierge team decides it would be a good experience to notify members when there’s been an update to their health care subsidy, the team managers can create their own Automat recipe that identifies when a subsidy amount changes and automatically sends a secure message to each affected member. Each secure message is dynamically generated to highlight the new, varying premium amounts, and even comes from the member’s concierge team. This process can be done without any intervention from an engineer and enables that team to do their job more efficiently and continuously improve our level of service and member experience on their own.

The benefits to our tech team, our business teams and, most importantly, our members, are clear. Thanks to flexible tools that enable non-engineers to use software on their own, the product and engineering teams are freed up to pursue larger projects, and the business teams are able to work more efficiently and independently. And our members receive the best consumer experience in the industry.