By 2019, Highmark’s in-house platform, enGen, had grown powerful enough to attract attention from other health plans. But we kept losing deals.

The problem wasn’t the technology.

It was the onboarding process. Every new partner wanted a customized proposal, and each time, we had to start from scratch.

The RFP process took three months, cost millions to prepare, and often missed the mark because we didn’t have a clear inventory of what the platform could actually do.

I led the overhaul from the inside. We started by cataloging everything. Capability by capability. Domain by domain.

I defined 145 distinct services the platform could deliver, from claims workflows to provider data syncs. Then we built a statistical model that could estimate cost and transformation effort with far more precision.

I worked across product, engineering, sales, and finance to embed the model into every proposal process.

This changed the game. RFP prep time dropped from three months to two weeks. Our win rate jumped from ten percent to forty-three percent.

Within months, we won and onboarded three new customers, including HealthNow BCBS.

That deal alone added five million new members and pushed Highmark’s total to twelve million.

Revenue rose to twenty-two billion in 2021, up twenty-two percent year over year.

For the first time, Highmark became the fourth-largest Blue Plan in the country. The new RFP engine turned our platform into a growth vehicle.

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