NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. & SOUTH NORWALK, Conn. - May 18, 2009 - The TriZetto Group, Inc. and HealthConnect Systems, Inc., today announced an exclusive partnership to develop new products and services that help payers, health insurance brokers and general agents significantly improve the entire sales and service life cycle.

TriZetto® Quote2Card will integrate TriZetto's Facets® and QNXT™ enterprise administration platforms with HealthConnect’s broadly adopted broker portal and sales automation tools to provide payers and brokers a complete end-to-end solution for sales and service processes, including prospecting, rating and quoting, underwriting, enrollment, billing, membership and customer service.

"We are going beyond the limited functionality that today’s single-point products offer to provide healthcare payers with an integrated sales automation solution that offers straight-through processing from quote to ID card generation,” said Eric Grossman, TriZetto’s vice president of revenue enablement. “By partnering with HealthConnect, we are ensuring our payer customers gain the broadest access and easiest connectivity to the channel responsible for selling the most policies – the broker," he added. "Highlighting the need for this type of solution, in a 2008 study by TriZetto, brokers reported that it takes 18-29 days, twice as long as they would like, to close individual and small group customers. Importantly, data from Sherlock Company showed that approximately 43% of administrative expense on fully insured programs for Blue Cross Blue Shield plans is concentrated in sales cycle activities. In addition, the prospect of both federal and state healthcare reform further underscores the need to streamline administration processes and costs."

"This next generation sales automation capability, which integrates the broker and payer sales and service processes will differentiate and drive more business to participating payers,” said Peter Everett, chief executive officer of HealthConnect. “Importantly, it will eliminate a significant number of ID card and eligibility customer service issues and allow brokers more time to sell."

Currently, the high-volume individual, family and small-group health insurance sales and enrollment process is paper- and fax-intensive, with considerable data re-entry and manual steps. Too often, the consequences are data errors, incorrect effective dates, late member ID cards, a quote-to-sale cycle time that is unacceptable to brokers, and member dissatisfaction.

"Integrated Healthcare Management improves the information pathways between the various constituents that comprise the U.S. healthcare supply chain,” said Dan Spirek, TriZetto’s executive vice president of strategy and communications. “TriZetto will continue to build partnership bridges such as this across the industry to drive better coordination of benefits and care to get the most out of every healthcare dollar for every consumer, and ultimately improve the cost, quality and availability of healthcare in our country."

About HealthConnect

HealthConnect, www.healthconnectsystems.com, is the leading online network for buyers and sellers of health insurance and employee benefits. HealthConnect’s multi payer portal enables medical and ancillary carriers as well as service providers to increase sales, reduce customer acquisition costs and obtain actionable market intelligence about their broker distribution channel. Health insurance agents can reduce costs through automation and increase sales through competitive differentiation and increased retention, and employers and employees can eliminate the administrative burden of working with multiple providers through separate systems. Since 1993, HealthConnect has successfully completed over 50 carrier implementations. HealthConnect’s network processes 12,000 quote requests per day from 6,700 agents across nineteen states.

About TriZetto

Founded in 1997, TriZetto is a privately held healthcare information technology company. With its technology touching half of the U.S. insured population, TriZetto is Powering Integrated Healthcare Management. TriZetto provides information technology solutions that enable health insurance payers and other constituents in the healthcare supply chain to improve the coordination of benefits and care for healthcare consumers. The company's offerings include enterprise and component software, hosting and business process outsourcing services, and consulting.

CONTACTS:

For TriZetto:
Schwartz Communications
Melissa Bruno
781-684-0770
trizetto@schwartz-pr.com

For HealthConnect:
HealthConnect Systems
Marcela Talisse, 203-840-3126
marcela.talisse@healthconnectsystems.com