Expanded agreement with IBM Services to improve healthcare experience for nearly 40-million consumers

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the expansion of a services agreement with Anthem, Inc., one of the nation’s leading healthcare companies.

With this collaboration, IBM and Anthem will work together to help drive Anthem’s digital transformation and deliver an enhanced digital experience for its nearly 40 million consumers.

“We are seeing a dynamic change in the healthcare industry, requiring us to be more agile and responsive, utilizing advanced technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive better quality and outcomes for consumers,” said Tim Skeen, senior vice president and chief information officer, Anthem, Inc. “Our continued strategic partnership with IBM will help establish a stronger foundation for Anthem to respond to the changing demands in the market, deliver greater quality of services for consumers and help accelerate Anthem’s focus on leading the transformation of healthcare to create a more accessible, more affordable, more accountable healthcare system for all Americans.”

Anthem continues to be at the forefront of using technology to provide innovative solutions. Under the expanded agreement, IBM will provide Anthem with enterprise services for its mainframe and data center server and storage infrastructure management. In addition, IBM will work with Anthem towards creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) environment which will allow for an automated infrastructure providing 24/7 digital capabilities. This will bring greater value and access to Anthem’s consumers, care providers, and employees.

IBM and Anthem will also continue to work together on IT automation. Since 2015, the two companies’ have implemented over 130 bots, automating over 70 percent of the monthly high volume repetitive tasks. This includes bots that can identify when a server is reaching capacity to shift workloads to other less utilized servers ensuring that work is not impacted. This capability has improved systems availability as well as freed up resources to work on higher-value projects.

“The collaboration between IBM Services and Anthem has already laid the groundwork to improve healthcare processes and quality,” said Martin Jetter, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. “Our latest agreement will accelerate Anthem’s growth strategy and continued leadership as one of the largest healthcare insurance companies and provide a solid path to bringing new efficiencies in driving digital transformation.”