The Congressional Budget Office estimates that health reform will expand coverage to 32 million by 2019 and 24 million will be enrolled through exchanges by 2019, not counting employer coverage, meaning health plans need to quickly take advantage of this short window of growth or risk losing share and revenue to competitors. According to a recent Gartner report, “Health insurers that do not have effective online sales and service functionality for the individual market must immediately establish such capabilities to compete in the current market and meet future requirements of exchanges.”*

“In light of changing regulations, health plans must now focus on winning share and loyalty through adaptive and efficient sales processes and exceptional customer experience while preparing to integrate sales and service processes with each health insurance exchange in 2014,” said Dennis Schmuland, director, U.S. Health Plans Industry Solutions, Microsoft. “Through a comprehensive CRM strategy that is pre-integrated with various touch points in the sales process, our Health Plan Sales Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables insurers to easily and quickly capture critical sales data, reduce the cost of sales, service, and retention, and interoperate with state health insurance exchanges by 2014.”

The Health Plan Sales Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an interoperable framework that allows for more seamless integration with existing systems and applications. Partners can pre-integrate their solution to offer health plans a seamless workflow across different applications, and a number of Microsoft’s trusted partners, including Ingenix, CosmoCom Inc., VUE Software and Colibrium Partners LLC, are already supporting this framework.

The platform enables insurers to more easily design and deploy a complete CRM strategy that spans acquisition, retention, health and care manag