In today’s modern world, tech can happen anywhere. That's why “Getting to Noyo” is so important as we reach out to learn more about the innovators and entrepreneurs in the benefits industry! Hosted by Gary Davis, National Practice Leader at Noyo, this YouTube series explores the leaders and visionaries helping usher in a new era of modern benefits.

For episode two, Gary welcomed Daryl Hemeon and Eddie Choi, Directors of Customer Solutions at Noyo, for a chat on one of the key capabilities of API technology: reading and writing. From the impact of EDI on brokers and employers, to the opportunities of better automation, this episode explored why real-time communication is benefits innovation.

Here’s a recap of their conversation, with the full-length video below:

How is the industry navigating the shift to API solutions?

Eddie: “Well, if I could zoom out a little bit and talk a little bit about the industry. I think there's definitely this inertia that is resistant to change. And I would say technology hasn't always been the most important thing when it comes to insurance and benefits administration, right? And so when you think about EDI, you know actually, a number of years ago, I remember I was working for a ben-admin, and my CEO said something like, EDI doesn't sell. It's not glamorous. It's kind of a loaded statement. But one thing I've learned to agree with is connectivity is an expectation. It's table stakes. And so... is EDI bad? No, it accomplishes what it's trying to do. But the problem is that's 30-year-old technology, there's better ways to connect today. And I think that kind of leads my thought into a second place and you know, who has to manage the fallout of EDI? It's brokers, HR administrators. And I think they are the ones that make buying decisions and so, yeah, I just think that times are changing. They are going to want better automation and APIs.”

What role is consumer behavior playing in driving change?

Daryl: “What I think is changing from the carrier 's perspective is they're really becoming more in tune with consumer behavior. Consumer behavior expects a real-time conversation in any transaction, anything that you do. And that's not batching up a file and hoping for the best. That's real-time communication about an action that I take, I expect a response. That comes from e-commerce all the way through everything we interact with today is or could be in near real-time. And I think that's a big shift for me. That idea is trickling now into insurance and really is the reason why people talk about insurtech. Why is there insurtech? It's because they are trying to upend how things have been traditionally done.”

Related article: 30 key stats on the state of modern employee benefits

Why is reading so important in the use of APIs?

Eddie: “I think Daryl and I would agree, fundamentally in a REST API, you should be able to write to it, POST, and then GET, so you can query an endpoint. And that's really important for APIs. So delivering the mail once a week, which is what EDI does, I mean, it has its limitations. It's kind of like you deliver it and you expect it to get there. Will it get there? Who knows. With APIs you can actually track things. So for Noyo, what we use it for, is if we get a member request like a new hire, we can track not only that it was sent, but that it was delivered, it's processing, and then ultimately verify that it got there and it was processed correctly.”

Daryl: “Yeah, I think even from a talk about a why read, to piggyback on that, why reading is important. A fundamental software design and construction of a platform I would say necessitates the ability to send in data and get data back. When you're constructing a platform that's API-first, you don't see a platform in any industry that is one way. You need to be able to query that source for data. And for us, why that is so important is that Noyo can become that central place where our customers could query our platform for an aggregated source of data. And that is due to us being able to and our customers being able to read from us.”

Related article: Proactively detecting enrollment issues: Noyo vs Other Solutions

How does Noyo prevent coverage issues from happening?

Daryl: “Actually I would say it's not that complicated. But what we do, right, is when we intake data about a person and say there's some type of change to their profile, we validate that. We basically run code against that data to make sure that it's sound and makes sense. A lot of that is very like... You know, you think about it like when you're filling out a form for anything online and you enter an invalid email address, you get a message back that says ‘hey, this is wrong, it's not a right email address.’ We do that behind-the-scenes in code. And then that's one layer, the second layer is that we do some more sophisticated validation around business rules to make sure that that data doesn't get to a carrier and creates havoc and all sorts of errors in process. So we run code that stops bad data from coming in.”

Watch the full conversation

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