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Health Insurance Portals

Features, Development Steps, Costs, ROI

ScienceSoft relies on 13 years of experience in insurance software development and 20 years in healthcare IT to create custom health insurance portals that guarantee smooth user experiences and HIPAA-compliant PHI exchange.

Health Insurance Portals - ScienceSoft
Health Insurance Portals - ScienceSoft

Custom Health Insurance Portals: Quick Summary

Health insurance portals are designed to offer health payers’ members, agents, and healthcare partners convenient digital self-service tools, process automation capabilities, and secure access to essential insurance information.

Custom health insurance portals are a popular choice among insurers who want to design the portal around their specific workflows or include advanced automation features powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Such solutions can be directly integrated with all required systems (including legacy software) of the health insurer, partnering healthcare providers, and other parties.

Another advantage of custom health insurance portals is that they can be designed to support operational compliance with HIPAA, CMS, NAIC, EHB, and other necessary global and region-specific regulations. Plus, custom portals have no UX and UI design restrictions, meaning you can introduce fully tailored user experiences.

Launching a custom portal lets health payers significantly improve employee productivity and drive higher member and partner satisfaction.

  • Implementation time: 3–7 months.
  • Development cost: $70,000–$450,000+, depending on the portal’s complexity and the chosen development approach. Use our free configurator to estimate the cost for your case.
  • Average ROI: 190% within three years after launch.

 

Capabilities of Role-Specific Health Insurance Portals

In ScienceSoft’s projects, we create specialized and multi-purpose health insurance portals with functionality tailored to payers’ specific needs. Click on the cards below to explore the role-specific portal features often requested by our clients from the health insurance domain:

Key features for health insurance members

Member registration

  • Self-registration forms tailored to the client segment (individual, corporate), region, language, etc.
  • Data capture from forms and document scans using robotic process automation (RPA) and optical character recognition (OCR).
  • Automated KYC verification for new members.

Value-adding features:

  • Automated processing of digital documents (e.g., proof of identity, residence, occupation) using intelligent image analysis and machine learning (ML) technologies.
  • ML-supported validation of data provided by members against reliable sources (e.g., identity or employment databases).
  • Members’ e-signature capture and verification.
  • Real-time personalized content recommendations for each member.
See all

Account management for members

  • Managing and updating personal or business information and billing details via the portal.
  • Setting up the preferred language, communication channel, billing method, etc.
  • Uploading documents in different formats, including PDF, JPG, PNG, etc.
  • Viewing the health policy portfolio and the history of health insurance transactions.
  • Configurable notifications to members on the expiring policies, open enrollment dates, due payments, personal and billing info that needs updating, etc.
See all

Self-enrollment in health plans

  • Automated search for best-fitting health plans based on user-defined criteria (duration, cost, coverage terms, etc.).
  • Side-by-side comparison of coverage details across different plans.
  • A self-service premium calculator.
  • Filing enrollment questionnaires: describing health conditions, choosing a primary care provider, adding dependents, etc.
  • Automated generation of health insurance applications and their instant submission to the insurer.
  • Real-time monitoring of the enrollment and health policy issuance statuses.
  • Receiving printable digital policies.
  • Template-based requests for policy adjustment, renewal, and termination.

Value-adding features:

  • Dynamic enrollment questionnaires that auto-adapt depending on the insureds’ declared health conditions (e.g., displaying additional questions for applicants with chronic diseases).
See all

Premium payment

  • Support for various payment methods: bank transfer, card, check, digital wallet, etc.
  • Real-time processing of payments via the connected payment gateways.
  • Notifications to clients on successful and failed payments.
  • Scheduled payment retry in case of failure.
  • Recurring payment auto-deduction via direct debit for premiums paid in installments.
  • Automated payment reconciliation.

Value-adding features:

See all

Coverage verification and cost estimation

  • Criteria-based search for suitable healthcare specialists, facilities, and pharmacies across the insurer’s partner network.
  • Viewing provider profiles with information on services offered, accepted insurance plans, and referral requirements.
  • Checking whether specific medical services, procedures, and prescriptions are covered under the member's current insurance plan.
  • Viewing plan-specific coverage details (e.g., copays, deductibles, coinsurance) for different types of medical services.
  • Calculating out-of-pocket costs based on the selected service, provider, and location.
  • Template-based creation and submission of prior authorization requests (e.g., in case of turning to an out-of-network provider).
  • Tracking the status of pre-authorization requests.
  • Ability to download or share a digital summary of coverage verification and cost estimate.

Value-adding features:

  • Intelligent suggestions on the best-fitting healthcare providers
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Claim self-filing and tracking

  • Template-based creation of health insurance claims (accepting ICD-10 and CPT codes when provided).
  • Instant submission of claims with support for various formats of claim evidence (health test reports, hospital discharge summaries, prescription receipts, medical bills, etc.) to the insurer.
  • Alerts on claim filing errors (e.g., missing or incorrectly filed form fields).
  • Real-time claim status tracking.
  • Receiving explanations of benefits (EOB) and submitting appeals for disputable cases.
See all

Preventive and behavior-based care assistance

  • Scheduled notifications to members about recommended health screenings, vaccinations, and medical procedures.
  • Interactive tools for members to assess their overall health risks.
  • (For behavior-based health insurance) Interactive dashboards displaying health objectives, achievements, and rewards for health-conscious behaviors.

Value-adding features:

  • AI-powered suggestions to insureds on the proper steps to mitigate health risks, e.g., adjusting sleep and workout schedule or visiting a doctor.
  • Direct access to telemedicine services for health-related consultations.
See all

Member support

  • Live chat for members to communicate with the insurer’s servicing and support specialists.
  • A self-service knowledge base with articles and FAQs about insurance terms.
  • Scheduling in-person health payer appointments.

Value-adding features:

  • An AI-powered virtual assistant to instantly process users’ support inquiries and help users solve simple operational issues 24/7.
See all

 

Key features for health insurance agents and brokers

Agent and broker workflow automation

  • Rule-based capture and processing of health insurance leads.
  • Automated eligibility checks for applicants enrolling in federal insurance programs (Medicaid, Medicare, etc.).
  • Instant submission of health insurance applications, supporting documents, and pre-writing files to underwriters.
  • Automated generation of personalized customer quotes.
  • Real-time tracking of the underwriting progress.
  • Template-based creation of health insurance policies and customer invoices.
  • Sending health insurance documents to customers via email or instantly printing them.
  • Automated reporting of enrollment details to the insurer.
  • Live chat to communicate with underwriters, loss adjusters, reinsurers, etc.
  • Notifications to agents and brokers on the special enrollment policies nearing the expiration date to initiate interactions with members on the policy renewal.
See all

Health insurance data access

  • Secure, permission-based access for agents and brokers to:
    • Health plan data, policy prices, coverage terms, etc.
    • Member data: policies owned, billing history, claim history, and more.
    • Policyholder agreements and premium statements.
    • Promotional materials: product presentations, brochures, videos, etc.
  • Smart search across document content and metadata to quickly find relevant health insurance materials.

Value-adding features:

  • Natural language search (using text or voice commands) of the required
See all

Agent task management

  • Automated task assignments to health insurance agents based on their qualifications, availability, schedule, location, etc.
  • Automated creation and updating of task lists.
  • Configurable dashboards providing agents with an overview of scheduled in-person appointments, assigned tasks, their priorities, and deadlines.
  • Interactive reporting forms for agents to manually enter and adjust task completion statuses.
See all

Broker onboarding and commission management

  • Configurable forms for broker self-registration.
  • Uploading broker licenses, professional certifications, and E&O insurance policies.
  • Automated verification of broker licenses (e.g., against a NIPR database).
  • Rule-based calculation of broker commission.
  • Automated generation of commission invoices and invoice sending to the payer.
  • Monitoring due and received commissions and payout dates.
  • Rule-based commission reconciliation.
  • Notifications to brokers on licenses and certificates nearing the expiration dates.

Value-adding features:

  • AI-supported fully automated broker onboarding.
See all

Agent and broker performance monitoring

  • Personal dashboards showing key performance metrics by health plan, period, or customer segment (e.g., new enrollments, quote rate, conversion rate, targets vs. actuals).
  • Automated checks for compliance with internal policies and industry regulations.

Value-adding features:

  • Real-time alerts on non-compliance cases, e.g., improper insured communication, unverified enrollments, misrepresentation of health plans.
See all

Agent and broker knowledge support

  • A centralized knowledge base for agent and broker self-education:
    • Summaries of ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, employer, and short-term plans.
    • HIPAA policies, anti-fraud guidelines, and ethical sales practices.
    • Step-by-step enrollment guides.
    • Claim processing and reimbursement FAQs.
  • Agent and broker onboarding tours with content tailored by specialization (e.g., particular health coverage types or customer segments).
  • Private forums and discussion boards for agents and brokers.
  • (For agents) Rule-based assignment of e-learning programs to particular agents and real-time monitoring of agents’ learning progress.
See all

 

Key features for healthcare providers

Provider onboarding and pre-qualification

  • Healthcare provider self-registration and adding practice, billing, TIN, and contact information.
  • Rule-based provider pre-qualification against the insurer’s internal requirements (quality standards, sustainability, capacity, etc.).
  • Automated healthcare provider categorization by user-defined parameters (service category, location, strategic priority, etc.).
  • Configurable provider approval workflow.

Value-adding features:

  • AI-supported provider vetting based on the analysis of data submitted by providers and data from trusted external sources (e.g., CMS or AHD databases).
See all

Pre-authorization request creation and tracking

  • Template-based creation of pre-authorization requests for prescribed procedures, services, and medications (medication names can be standardized with RxNorm, when applicable).
  • Built-in checks for required documentation based on procedure type and payer rules.
  • Ad hoc and scheduled request submission to payers according to the order of payment (for members enrolled in multiple health plans).
  • Monitoring the status of pre-authorization requests (pending confirmation, approved, etc.).
  • Automated notifications on request status changes or missing information.
  • E-signature workflow.
See all

Claim filing and resolution monitoring

  • Pre-submission verification of insurance eligibility and benefits to prevent unnecessary claim rejections.
  • Template-based claim filing and submission (supporting HIPAA X12 837 via clearinghouses).
  • Support for bulk claim submission and processing for high-volume providers.
  • Uploading claim-supporting documents in various formats (PDF, JPEG, TIFF, DICOM, CCDA, FHIR-compliant JSON or XML files, etc.).
  • Automated invoice generation and submission to the insurer.
  • Real-time claim status tracking.
  • Configurable notifications on claim approvals and denials.
  • Online submission and tracking of appeals.
  • Ability to correct and resubmit denied or rejected claims directly through the portal.

Value-adding features:

  • An AI assistant to guide providers through claim filing.
See all

Collaborative features for health payers and healthcare providers

  • HIPAA-compliant exchange of health insureds’ personal health information.
  • Secure exchange of contracts, claims (X12 837), electronic remittance advice (X12 835), etc.
  • Instant messaging and videoconferencing for insurer-provider communication.
  • Configurable dashboards showing each provider’s real-time performance metrics (pre-authorization rates, average time to authorize, service utilization, PQRS, HEDIS, and MIPS indicators, and more).
  • Automated provider performance benchmarking against network and industry standards.

Value-adding features:

  • A shared digital environment for:
    • Managing complex patient cases.
    • Designing health insurance policies and innovative programs like PAYL and parametric health insurance.
    • Negotiating reimbursement rates.
  • Handling multi-party appeals.
See all

 

Key features for portal administrators

Content management

  • Uploading, editing, and publishing informational and promotional content:
    • Health plan details, knowledge articles, data on new products and discounts for members.
    • Health plan summaries, servicing guidelines, compliance policies for agents and brokers.
    • Policy details, enrollment and claim settlement resources for providers.
  • Creating and managing custom forms (e.g., member enrollment questionnaires, pre-authorization forms).
  • Launching and processing customer experience surveys and polls.
  • Content versioning.
  • Content categorization and segmentation for various user groups.

Value-adding features:

  • AI-supported content translation and localization.
See all

User account and data management

  • Configurable dashboards for admins to manage user accounts and monitor user activities on the portal.
  • Rule-based approval of new user accounts.
  • Automated processing and distribution of user support requests.
  • A complete log of user account management activities.

Value-adding features:

  • AI-powered straight-through processing of data and documents submitted by users during self-registration and instant notifications on missing, erroneous, or contradicting data pieces.
  • AI-powered real-time detection of suspicious user activities that may indicate fraud, e.g., rapid multiple submissions or changes in personal details before filing a claim.
See all

Security and compliance

  • Configuring user roles and permissions to view, edit, download, and share particular health insurance data and documents.
  • Role-based access control.
  • Multi-factor user authentication.
  • Portal data encryption at rest and in transit.
  • End-to-end audit trail of manipulations of user accounts by admins.
  • Monitoring the compliance of user activities, data storage, processing, and access procedures with the payer’s internal policies and regulatory rules (e.g., HIPAA requirements for PHI protection).
See all

Important Integrations for a Health Insurance Portal

Integrating a health insurance portal with corporate and external systems helps enhance the degree of process automation and minimize low-value efforts.

Below, ScienceSoft shares a sample list of integrations for a health insurance portal. The actual list will depend on the user groups your portal serves and the specifics of your software system.

Important Integrations for a Health Insurance Portal

Health insurer systems

CRM

  • For automated recording and centralized storage of all member data, including the history of interactions via the portal.
  • For data-driven planning of marketing activities.
  • To keep the insureds, agents, and brokers updated on the new health plans and personalized offerings.
  • For faster processing of health insurance applications.
  • To instantly communicate coverage-related decisions to insureds, agents, and brokers.
  • For instant claim aggregation and facilitated claim status reporting to members.
  • To provide agents and brokers with streamlined access to the members’ claim summaries.
  • To streamline claim evidence gathering for data-driven claim settlement.
  • To enable agents and brokers to promptly upload, access, and share policy-related data and documents.

An agency management system

For accurate planning of health insurance agent workload and streamlined agent task assignment.

  • For automated recording of health insurance payment transactions in the general ledger.
  • For streamlined agent payroll and broker commission management.
  • For timely payments to healthcare providers.

Healthcare provider systems

Medical billing or revenue cycle management (RCM) software

  • For quicker estimation of due amounts and invoice auto-population with patient and payer data.
  • To speed up claim, invoice, and appeal submission to health payers.
  • For accurate cash flow forecasting.
  • For faster eligibility verification, service confirmation, and appointment scheduling.
  • To promptly share claim-supporting documents with the payer.
  • To enable swift access to remote medical services for members.
  • For streamlined sharing of virtual visit summaries, health and treatment plans, and medication e-receipts with members and payers.

Third-party systems

  • For instant processing of premium payments and real-time visibility into payment progress.

Communication channels

(SMS services, messaging apps)

  • To quickly notify users about in-portal events.

7 Steps to Build a Secure and User-Friendly Health Insurance Portal

Below, ScienceSoft’s insurance software development team outlines the common steps and best practices for engineering secure and user-friendly health insurance portals.

1.

Requirements gathering and functional design

Insurance IT consultants analyze your needs and document functional requirements for the future portal. It’s important to map the necessary regulatory requirements at this early stage to guarantee compliant portal design from the onset. At ScienceSoft, we also advise our clients on the value-adding automation and self-service features (e.g., AI-supported document processing, smart assistants) that would increase the solution’s adoption and ROI in the long run.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

2.

Technical design

Architects design a secure and scalable architecture for the health insurance portal and its integrations with the required systems, keeping in mind the need for easy portal evolution in the future. They also compose the optimal tech stack for portal engineering.

Rational tech stack choices can save insurers up to 70% in development costs. For example, if you don’t need portal integrations with legacy home-grown systems and don’t pursue never-before-seen UX/UI design, you could build your web portal on a low-code platform like Microsoft Power Apps or SharePoint. From my experience, this option usually costs around 3x less compared to developing from scratch.

Head of AI and Principal Architect at ScienceSoft

3.

UX and UI design

UX/UI designers map out role-specific user journeys and create a modern, aesthetically appealing visual appearance of the health insurance portal. Opt for straightforward UX, laconic layouts, and neutral color palettes to avoid overwhelming users. Design teams at ScienceSoft stick to ISO 9241 guidelines for human-centered design to ensure that the portals we deliver provide intuitive workflows and clean interfaces.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

4.

Project planning

Project managers determine the development project task scope, compose the optimal team, and define a tailored set of KPIs to control the team’s performance and project health. At this stage, ScienceSoft’s PMs are able to deliver time and budget estimates with up to 90% accuracy and introduce a pragmatic strategy to mitigate potential risks.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

5.

Development and quality assurance

Development teams code the back end, create role-specific user interfaces based on the planned UI designs, and set up scalable data storage for your health insurance portal. Taking the Agile approach lets us deliver an MVP for the portal in 3–5 months and speed up further releases. At ScienceSoft, QA teams run tests (functional, usability, security) in parallel with development to quickly spot potential issues and prevent costly fixes at later project stages.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

6.

Integration

The portal is integrated with your internal systems, the systems of your healthcare partners, external data platforms, and third-party services (payments, messaging, etc.). Integration testing is a must to validate data flow accuracy, interoperability, and security. At this stage, we also double-check adherence to HIPAA to ensure compliant PHI exchange among the connected systems and validate FHIR API interoperability with EHRs (USCDI-aligned). If compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act is applicable (where EHI exchange is involved), integration testing also involves HIPAA X12 837/835 transaction flows.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

7.

Deployment

At this stage, engineers configure health insurance portal infrastructure, establish data backup and recovery mechanisms, implement robust network security tools (IDS/IDP, firewalls, SIEM, etc.), and set the portal live. In ScienceSoft’s engagements, we provide detailed technical documentation to streamline portal maintenance and draw user manuals to help members, agents, and healthcare providers quickly resolve arising issues.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

Robust Techs and Tools for Health Insurance Portal Development

Back-end programming languages

Front-end programming languages

Languages

JavaScript frameworks

Platforms & CMSs

Mobile

Low-code development

Microsoft Power Apps

Microsoft Power Automate

App Engine Studio (ServiceNow)

Bubble.io

Clouds

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform

DigitalOcean

Rackspace Technology

Databases / data storages

SQL

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft Fabric

MySQL

Azure SQL Database

Oracle

PostgreSQL

NoSQL

Cloud databases, warehouses, and storage

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud SQL

Google Cloud Datastore

Other

Microsoft Fabric

Real-time data processing

RabbitMQ

Apache Flink

Apache Spark Streaming

Apache Storm

Apache Kafka Streams

Amazon Kinesis

Azure Event Hubs

Azure Stream Analytics

How Much It Costs to Develop a Health Insurance Portal

Building a health insurance portal may cost around $70,000$450,000, depending on the portal's functional complexity, the number of user roles, the scope of integrations, and requirements for solution performance, scalability, security, and UX/UI.

Here are the ballpark cost estimates based on ScienceSoft's experience in similar projects:

$70,000–$150,000

A platform-based (e.g., SharePoint, Power Apps) agent portal providing basic workflow automation features and connected to 1–3 internal systems.

$100,000–$250,000

A custom member self-service portal of average complexity, integrated with 2–5 internal or partner systems.

$250,000–$450,000+

A comprehensive portal spanning several role-specific interfaces (e.g., for members and healthcare providers) and offering value-adding features like smart AI assistants and telehealth integration.

Key Benefits of Health Insurance Portals

A tailored health insurance portal can bring around 190% ROI within three years after launch.

The ROI is driven by the following major benefits:

Enhanced customer experience

Equipping members with convenient digital self-service tools and providing personalized user journeys drives up to a 90% increase in customer engagement and an 80%+ improvement in retention.

Improved operational efficiency

Introducing self-service options lets health payers achieve a 50%+ reduction in agent workload. Agent-side task automation, digital collaboration, and instant data access features enable 2–25x quicker workflows.

Growth in business profitability

For large health payers, improved customer loyalty, more efficient servicing processes, and streamlined partner collaboration result in up to 4% higher revenue growth rates and up to 2% lower operational costs.

ScienceSoft’s Clients Say

What stood out was ScienceSoft's proactive suggestions for cost-saving architecture design and tech stack. Their input ensured we stayed within budget without compromising on quality. The value we derived from partnering with ScienceSoft is definitely worth the investment.

Star Star Star Star Star

ScienceSoft proved to be a reliable vendor with a solid healthcare background. They created comprehensive project documentation, feature lists, and worked out thorough recommendations to help us improve the stability and performance of our solution.

We teamed up with ScienceSoft trusting a solid experience that the company had in web portal development, and never regretted the decision. The team proved to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and highly motivated. We truly appreciated their collaborative approach.

Boost Your Health Insurance Workflows With a Custom Portal

In web portal development since 2005, ScienceSoft provides full-scale consulting and engineering services to help health payers create sleek and secure portals for insureds, agents, and healthcare partners. Being ISO 9001- and ISO 27001-certified, we apply a mature quality management system and guarantee the security of our clients’ data.