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WellPoint EVP/CIO Lori Beer
partners IT with business strategy
Her focus is simplifying how people navigate the healthcarematrix in this new, consumer-driven era
 'Technology is a huge enabler” in connecting people with healthcare and keeping medical costs down, says Lori Beer, executive VP and CIO of WellPoint Inc (Indianapolis, IN).
That’s why Beer works so hard to partner with WellPoint’s business leaders: she wants IT to be an integral part of WellPoint’s overall business strategy. That involves simplifying how people navigate the healthcare matrix in this new, consumer-driven era.
“A lot of companies can no longer afford to
offer healthcare as a benefit, and so customers are having to make their own choices about healthcare. It’s important that we give them
the information they need to understand it,” Beer says.
WellPoint, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, is the nation’s largest health insurance company in terms of membership. One out of every nine Americans is a member of a WellPoint-affiliated health plan.
Engaging business partners
Beer has been at WellPoint for ten of her twenty years in IT. She was appointed acting CIO in May 2008, and CIO in August. During the first months of her leadership she worked on engaging her business partners with her strategy for IT.
“I want us to focus on the right level of engagement so that we become more consultative. At the end of the day we should be delivering a solution or product to our business partners and customers.” This might be a software application, a stable network or email. “I want to make sure that we not only deliver the core-based elements of strategy, but also the capabilities,” Beer says.
3,000 IT folks
WellPoint employs about 3,000 IT associates, according to Beer. Twelve supervisors, most of them SVPs, report to her.
She usually starts her day at four AM, catching up on how IT is evolving and contributing to corporate performance around the world. Then she moves on to videoconference calls, helping leadership team members stay connected with their employees and “making sure all the pieces come together.”
She has to make sure key software vendors are “in lockstep” with WellPoint’s objectives. She spends a couple of hours a month with the entire IT management team through Web-casting, and she travels frequently to various WellPoint locations.
Beer’s IT staff knows she holds them accountable for delivering results, but she stays away from micromanagement. “I help them see their strengths and the possibility of what they can do. That’s the biggest thing.”
Support from all
Beer notes that throughout her career she’s always felt supported by her male colleagues. Plus, WellPoint is 77 percent female and the current CEO is a woman.
She’s never had problems balancing her family’s needs with work. She has two teenage daughters and an eleven-year-old son. Five years ago her husband quit his job to become a stay-at-home dad. “It’s easier for me to do the job with his support,” she says.
Beer grew up on a 116-acre farm in Waterport, NY. Being a farm girl “taught me integrity and gave me my work ethic, to work hard to deliver results,” she remembers.
Her dad was a chemist and business exec at Kodak, but in his off time he tended apple trees and a herd of beef cattle. Beer and her brother and sister, brought up on the farm, all grew up to be engineers.
EE courses and Fortran
Beer started studying EE at the University of Dayton (Dayton, OH). In her freshman year she took her first circuits class and a class in Fortran. “I liked the idea of the business problem: how do I build something to solve it? That was the key to computers for me,” she says. She completed a BS in computer science in 1989.
After college Beer got married and found a job as a software engineer at Westinghouse’s Savannah River Site facility (Aiken, SC). She worked on systems to support engineering operations for about a year. Then her husband got a job in Cincinnati, OH, and she moved to Convergys Corp (Cincinnati, OH) as a systems analyst. She developed a product that supported development, configuration and rating of telecom products.
Team lead
From 1993 to 1995 she was a team lead and systems analyst at Convergys. She researched the cable industry, identifying software to support interactive cable services. From 1995 to 1998 she was senior tech consultant and team lead on Precedent 2000, a customer-care software solution for wireless phones. She coordinated development efforts for multiple releases of the product.
Beer joined WellPoint in 1998. She ran into a former manager who had moved to the company, and he told her about the major investment WellPoint was making in new technologies. “I debated it and saw the potential to make a difference. I was excited about the opportunity,” she recalls.
Shaping strategy
At WellPoint Beer has helped shape the company’s data strategy and technology architecture and led system migration strategies.
She began as manager for Anthem IT, overseeing development of medical management systems until 2000. Anthem is now a WellPoint subsidiary.
Her focus shifted in 2001, as she took over responsibility for system consolidation for Anthem’s central region. She successfully migrated six legacy apps to a new system called Facets, affecting some 2.6 million subscribers.
In 2003, Beer became the western regional executive for WellPoint IT. For two years she directed technology initiatives to boost that region’s performance.
In 2005 Beer became VP of enterprise project delivery. She played a key role in WellPoint’s new IT strategy, including healthcare payer competitive analysis, assessment of technology and healthcare trends, and developing a vision for WellPoint’s technology architecture. She took over her EVP/CIO job in 2008.
Positive effect
Beer likes the way healthcare IT positively affects people’s lives.
“The opportunities are very complex, even though you are leveraging technology to simplify things,” she says. If the job is done right, “You make information more transparent to the consumers, and that can help them find the best location for the best health outcome.
“We can have an impact on people’s health. That, for me, is what’s exciting about the job.”
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