Project Description
MyPlanLink is a marketplace platform for health insurance providers (aka providers for short) that offers their customers a branded experience to shop, quote, compare, and enroll in a variety of health, dental, and vision products.
The goal was to build a set of web services that this platform could flexibly and safely pass customer enrollment and payment information to which could then submit it to the health insurance providers. This included:
- Tokenization of payment information
- Reception of enrollment from the platform
- Transformation from received enrollment into providers’ formats
- Submission of enrollments and payment information to providers’
Contributions
Out of a team of developers, my primary contributions were:
- Payment tokenization and ecryption
- Test harness for tokenization
- Submission of enrollments to providers
Challenges Overcame
This was my first experience building something that tokenized and encrypted actual payment information which was a high-security, business-critical task. This involved a variety of encryption techniques and software to accomplish.
The biggest challenge was scalability. For n number of health insurance providers, there can be n number of enrollment submission methods that they themselves require to receive the enrollment, such as:
- E-fax of PDF enrollments
- Token-protected web APIs with enrollment as custom-formatted in JSON
- .NET SOAP web services protected with encryption and public keys
- PDFs sent via FTP for manual processing
Accomplishments
This was a brand new business venture and a new concept in the development of the federal and state-run marketplaces for the Affordable Healthcare Act.
The skills I developed most were:
- Web service security techniques and standards
- Scalability
- Service-oriented architecture focus
- Encryption and tokenization
- Working with clients’ technical teams directly
