Return of the Oscar Tech Blog
After a hiatus, the Oscar tech blog is back!
Over the past couple of years, since we last posted, Oscar’s tech team has grown to more than 35 “pods” (cross-functional teams featuring a product manager, a designer, and a small group of engineers that own a part of our tech stack). We’ve augmented the tech team in important ways: product operations, product strategy, technical product management (as a team), and technical program management are all relatively recent additions! And we’ve launched a host of new services and experiences for our members and other stakeholders:
- Virtual primary care, powered by the Oscar EHR
- Free same day drug delivery through a unique partnership with Capsule
- Apollo, our proprietary clinical data platform
- Our end-to-end claims system, which now runs all of our lines of business
- Dynamic plan design
- Personalized cost estimates
- Peer-to-peer SMS (in beta)
…and much more.
As the first consumer-centric health insurance company, one that also delivers high touch primary care through Oscar Medical Group, and powers insurance plans for other payers and providers, Oscar has a unique vantage point on pretty much every corner of the healthcare industry, and we’ve had the opportunity to work on nearly all of the industry’s hardest challenges. We use off-the-shelf solutions whenever it makes sense, but aren’t afraid to build where we think we can differentiate, and have created an ecosystem of applications, systems, and tools that we believe has no equal elsewhere (we often say that for every pod at Oscar, there is a stand-alone company — or several — solving similar problems).
We’ve climbed many (steep) hills, and learned many (humbling) lessons — as technologists, and as front-row participants in the vast, eclectic, fast-changing-yet-slow-moving industry that is healthcare.
We’re excited to share some of what we’ve learned in a series of posts that will be a mix of product reflections, release notes, technical geek-ery, and data insights.
We plan to publish at least once a month. Stay tuned :)
-The Oscar Tech Team
P.S. We’ve also recently launched a design-focused sister blog — check it out!
