Leading Health Insurer Achieves Huge Growth and Engagement with Vbrick

This leading health insurer provides a wide range of health insurance solutions for individuals, businesses, and government entities. It has been moving its employee engagement steadily toward video solutions for over a decade and has partnered with Vbrick along the way. Today it uses Vbrick for live and on-demand video streaming as well as managing its library of over 110TB of recorded video content intended to help with employee engagement, internal messaging, and knowledge transfer.

Since before 2011, this health insurer was a relatively early adopter in using video as a form of employee engagement. They committed to a long-term plan to consistently move internal messaging, knowledge sharing, and other employee communication functions to video. As a leading health insurer, they have a huge employee base that has grown from roughly 20,000 in 2010, to over 70,000 today, and includes a couple of substantial acquisitions. Communicating with these employees is of primary importance, especially in a constantly changing technological and regulatory environment where policies and procedures change frequently, and employee communication must be clear to be effective. A key challenge has been managing the steady adoption and growth of video while also increasing quality, stability, video performance, and the ability of the organization to operate and manage its video capabilities efficiently.

This health insurer has grown with Vbrick, starting with legacy on-premises Vbrick Video Enterprise Media Systems technology, then Vbrick Online Streaming Service, and finally migrating to the current cloud-based Vbrick Enterprise Video Platform in 2016. The insurer uses Vbrick multicast eCDN and Distributed Media Engine devices to distribute video at scale for 20,000 to 30,000 users on a regular and consistent basis. Once a quarter it needs to communicate to the entire employee base with events that can scale to 60,000 attendees. Weekly, it has events for moderate subsets of its employee base, which can range from 25,000 to 30,000.

With this vast video usage, the insurer makes it a standard practice to use of Vbrick’s AI capabilities to transcribe and translate events — both live and on-demand.

Using Webex as its video client, the insurer initially stored video in the Webex application. However, there were both compliance and performance issues with using Webex for that function, so Vbrick took on video data storage for the insurer as well. Because most of the video content is health-related there are complex compliance and regulatory issues around stored video and both keeping and deleting it. While Vbrick has solved many of the regulatory and compliance issues for the insurer, managing and navigating the data library remains challenging. As a result, the insurer is very interested in leveraging Vbrick’s enhanced and generative AI capabilities to help solve some of the content discoverability issues they are facing.

The most significant outcome of this insurer’s long-standing partnership with Vbrick has been sustained growth. Spanning from 2011 to the present, this unusually long collaboration in the fast-evolving world of video technology has given the insurer ample time to master the use of video for effective internal communication.

The number of large-scale webcasts the insurer has delivered has grown over the period from about five a month to over 30 a month as usage of webcasts has penetrated deeper into the organization with its continued adoption of video.

In addition, the insurer’s storage needs for video has mushroomed. Prior to 2020, the insurer was storing under 10TB of data per month. Since then that number has grown to over 100TB of data per month and grew to over 200TB for a period during 2023 before Vbrick optimized the video storage for the insurer, a service it can provide for any customer. The insurer’s substantial increase in video content has also led to more strategic initiatives around retention policies that have translated into new workflows within Vbrick with engagement from our Professional Services team.

Video streaming is a rapidly evolving and adapting technological field, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, it is extremely unusual for a company to stick with one provider for well over 10 years as the insurer has done with Vbrick, and the insurer has been very happy with Vbrick’s responsiveness and ability to add or demonstrate how to utilize new features.