Rho Venture Capital: 2004 News

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Highmark Extends Avolent's Online Invoicing
to More Lines of Business

With Avolent's BizCast, Highmark saves IT dollars
by consolidating invoices from different plans
while offering self-service to more customers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
November 17, 2004

Avolent Inc., the leading provider of Financial Relationship Management (FRM) software, today announced that Highmark, one of the nation's largest health insurers, is leveraging BizCast™ to streamline the invoicing process for the company's Direct Pay, Claims Billing and just recently, its Group Premium lines of business. Highmark plans to expand in 2004 its use of BizCast to include the Highmark Subsidiary, Highmark Life and Casualty's Group Life, Group Disability and Stop Loss business. Highmark was able to accomplish this extension without costly IT upgrades or customizations due to BizCast's open systems architecture and standards as well as the product's robust functionality.

BizCast automates the manual financial processes of invoicing, dispute and member management, reconciliation, and payment -- enabling companies to accelerate cash flow, reduce printing and postage costs, and to provide their customers with self-service access to invoices. Companies like Highmark are also extending the life of their legacy IT systems by having BizCast consolidate invoices from multiple billing and financial databases from disparate business units rather than replacing or upgrading billing systems.

With over $8 billion in annual revenues, Highmark provides health, dental, vision, and life plans to 23 million members in Pennsylvania and across the country. Long recognized as an innovative insurer, Highmark launched their e-Bill program in 2002 with BizCast as part of their corporate initiatives to improve operational efficiencies, enhance customer service, and comply with HIPAA/privacy regulations. The key objective for the e-Bill program was to improve customer service by providing online invoicing for Highmark and their subsidiaries via one system. Crucial to this objective was the need to present a consolidated invoice to customers who had purchased multiple products from different Highmark companies.

"While we're a big plan with 'multiple personalities' -- multiple back end systems, subsidiaries, billing formats and brands, our customers wanted one invoice in the format that worked best for them," stated Al Dodson, Manager of EIPP at Highmark. "Avolent's BizCast was the one solution that could deliver this, making the process transparent to the customer and consolidating our billing without actually consolidating our billing systems, something that would require massive IT costs. We are also very pleased with the fact that we have been able to rapidly roll out our e-Bill program to so many different lines of business during the past two years"

In order to automate both the presentment and payment of invoices, BizCast had to consolidate invoicing data from several legacy and Peoplesoft A/R systems as well as integrate with a wide variety of outside banking and credit card systems. Fortunately, BizCast provides tools and a suite of plug-and- play adapters to reduce the cost, time, and risk of enterprise integration for customer-centric financial applications. BizCast delivers a suite of 35+ pre-defined adapters for integrating with enterprise applications (Oracle, SAP, Siebel), EAI middleware (Tibco, WebMethods), and open standards (EDI, XML, and HIPAA). These adapters are used with Avolent's Visual Data Mapper, a graphical environment for quickly mapping BizCast to other systems. Using BizCast adapters with the Visual Data Mapper can reduce the time for legacy systems integration by as much as 75%.

"Companies like Highmark want to invest their efforts and resources in providing their customers with optimal products and services, not in building massive IT infrastructures and organizations," declared Doug Roberts, CEO of Avolent. "Our solution enables these companies to make the invoicing process more accessible, responsive, and transparent to their customers without taking the 'rip n' replace' approach to the IT dept."

Customer response has been outstanding with adoption levels exceeding 30% in some business segments. In addition, customers have instant access to archived invoices and can create reports to analyze trends and costs.

While the cost avoidance savings in IT has been substantial, Highmark has realized significant savings in terms of less staff, paper, and postage for invoicing. In addition to reducing costs for themselves and their customers, Highmark had leveraged BizCast as a service to support several "partner" Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in other regions with their online invoicing -- providing these plans with the same functionality from the Highmark system but with their own brand and logo presented to the partner's customers. Highmark also plans to continue to extend BizCast into other subsidiaries and services.

ABOUT HIGHMARK
Highmark's mission -- to provide access to affordable, quality healthcare enabling individuals to live longer healthier lives -- is supported by the company's subsidiaries and affiliates that offer health, dental, vision, and life and casualty insurance throughout Pennsylvania and in all 50 states. Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is rated among the top 10 health plans nationally for member satisfaction, according to the National Committee for Quality Assurance's (NCQA) "State of Health Care Quality" in their September 2004 report. For more information, visit http://www.highmark.com.

ABOUT AVOLENT
Avolent is the leading provider of enterprise application software for Financial Relationship Management (FRM) to simplify and enhance the financial interactions between customers, employees, and partners. Avolent's award-winning FRM solutions encompass electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP), online account management and customer self-service, process management and workflow, enterprise employee access, and decision support. Founded in 1995, Avolent's customers and partners include some of the largest companies in the world, such as AT&T, Delta Dental of California, MasterCard, Office Depot, EDS, Spectrum, Unisys, Wells Fargo, DST Output, Health Alliance, Highmark, PacifiCare, and more. For more information call (800) 553-5505 or visit http://www.avolent.com.

Avolent and BizCast are registered trademarks of Avolent. All other product and company names are the property of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.

SOURCE Avolent Inc.
Web Site: http://www.avolent.com