TriLon Information Services, owned and founded by William Long, has designed, developed, maintained and customized mission-critical applications in a variety of industries with an emphasis on managed released as open source to the health care community. This system will replace the fragmented, expensive and often inadequate applications now being used. The vision is better and less expensive health care through effective provider-patient-payee information management.
The benefits administration system was originally developed for a health maintenance organization (HMO), and then redesigned and rewritten to give it the flexibility required by a third party administrator. The system has handled membership processing, eligibility determination, claims processing, billing, provider contract administration, provider capitation, utilization review, authorizations, referrals and Medicare. To comply with the Federal Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, the system is being designed and coded for secure Internet communications and data transmission. Once TriLon completes the update, it will offer installation, conversion, training and custom development services on a fee-for-service basis.
There is a crisis in health care costs. According to health care leaders, eliminating the fragmentation of the current health care information infrastructure would save the health care industry up to $80 billion per year while improving the quality of care and decreasing the vulnerability of health care professionals to expensive litigation. An excellent benefits administration system, designed with the total infrastructure in mind, is a vital component. By developing and releasing the system under the open source General Public License (GPL), TriLon will be able to draw on the design, development and implementation expertise of the health care and open source communities without the limits that would normally be imposed by the necessity of keeping secret its intellectual property. The result will be a higher quality benefits administration system and ultimately a higher quality health care information infrastructure.
The benefits system will be released to a broad range of managed care and claims administration companies, including third party administrators, health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations, self-insured employers and group health insurance carriers. Because open source is released with no limit on its distribution, service becomes the only salable product. Due to high software development costs and dependence on 'vendor lock-in' to secure control of customer service, proprietary software companies will have difficulty competing solely on the basis of service quality and price. Additional competitive advantage for TriLon will be gained from being the owner of the brand identity and creator of the customer-subscriber committee controlling ongoing support.
Member-users will have open access to software changes and enhancements whether made by TriLon, by members of the open source community or by customers who have modified the system for their own use and then released the enhancements back to the main distribution of the system. By thus collaborating and distributing the costs of the development effort, the cost for each customer is minimized. Where necessary, custom coding by TriLon or by the customer will maintain closeness of fit to the distinctive information needs of each member company.