A tailor-made health insurance with a business application using Drupal combined with Angular

^{Photo by Antoni Shkraba on Unsplash}

Founded by doctors, La Médecine Libre is a mutual insurance organization created as an alternative to traditional sector mutual insurers. Its goal is to guarantee quality care for everyone, prioritizing the relationship between healthcare professionals and policyholders.

Against the financialization of healthcare, this activist insurance provider places quality care at the heart of its mission, at a fair and reasonable price without extra fees, keeping out-of-pocket expenses to a minimum.

A business application based on 3 main features

For health insurance, the website is much more than a showcase. We're talking here about a business application, meaning a tool developed to cover all of a mutual health insurer’s activities: acquisition and engagement of policyholders, management of contracts, coverage, invoices, and user accounts.

In our case, this involves offering:

• For prospects, a personalized offer simulator for each profile (age, family situation, specific health needs, etc.), the ability to subscribe (digital signature), and to pay their contributions (online payment).
• For clients, a management area for their supplementary health insurance (client account).
• For the insurer's sales team, a sales tool.

It was with all these objectives in mind that La Médecine Libre approached us to redesign its application with Drupal, accelerate its digital transformation, and revamp user journeys and its image, which had become outdated.

• Improve the commercial performance of digital by increasing revenue;
• Increase customer satisfaction by enabling the generation of quotes, contracts, and precise, professional follow-up;
• Enable the company to improve operator performance through process automation;
• Allow users to access their file information at any time.

General Functional Scope

The business application, fully configurable in Drupal, allows the administration of:

• Products (Drupal / Symfony);
• Reimbursements;
• Quote generation (individual and group health insurance);
• Subscription to individual or group health insurance;
• Simplified CRM for prospects and clients;
• Contract amendments, renewals, and cancellations;
• Sales appointment booking;
• Management of contributions and their online payment;
• Management of reminders by email and commercial animation of users;
• Contract management, PDF generation, and signing via HelloSign;
• Views needed for activity monitoring;
• Statistical tracking;

The application also allows management of all site content:

• Blog management;
• Administration of editorial pages with a paragraph library (Paragraphs module);
• Administration of landing pages with an available block library;
• Administration of the group health insurance area for employers and accountants;
• Administration of the individual health insurance area.

All of these developments involved migrating content from the previous Symfony application; otherwise, business continuity would have been impossible (clients, prospects, contracts, quotes, etc.).

Three Sales Funnels

The health insurance targets three different audiences:

• Individuals;
• Businesses;
• Healthcare professionals.

We therefore designed a Drupal website centered around three sales funnels, each presenting a questionnaire on the prospect’s situation and allowing them to arrive at the offer best suited to their profile.

Most often, the price of a complementary health insurance depends on the client's profile. How old are they? Are they married? Do they have children? What is their profession? What are their needs regarding dental or optical care? And so on.

Before building the website, there is therefore a logic of personalization to understand and formalize in order to then integrate it.

This data is collected during the question-and-answer phase, which leads to a quote. At this stage, each answer given by the user impacts the rest of the questionnaire, and each answer brings a new set of questions.

Such a degree of personalization is the result of thorough preparatory work: around ten workshops to understand these logics, formalize them, and translate them into algorithms. This makes it possible to create a highly detailed flowchart and specifications document, and allows developers to, in turn, understand these logics and translate them into code.

For this project, the UX and UI design was carried out by a communications agency with whom our client had a relationship before seeking our services. We therefore received the mockups from this agency. And then, surprise!

When we opened the mockups, we noticed several issues: 

• Missing page templates;
• A random grid layout;
• No real design system or atomic logic;
• Inconsistent UX flows.

We therefore had to alert our client to the situation and persuade them to reopen a project they had already paid for and believed was complete. 

Beyond the creative aspect that characterizes the UI designer’s role, a solid understanding of web constraints and mastery of the entire production chain of a website are essential for designing a successful user interface. 

Decoupling Drupal with Angular

On the technical side, our developers sought out the best tool for the most efficient implementation possible. There are several reasons why Drupal is the ideal tool for this type of project.

The strengths of Drupal:

• With its modules, it allows us to integrate out-of-the-box functionalities without writing extra code. Many administration and business management interfaces were quickly configured using Drupal’s Views module.
• It enables secure processing of sensitive data (personal data).
• Its back office provides easy visualization and management of users (clients and prospects) and permissions by roles (sales, assistants, management).

For this project, we used a theme based on Emulsify  (which relies on webpack as the build engine). It uses components and Storybook.

Given the number of requests and the importance of simulators in the user journey, we decided to use Angular JS, a free and open-source JavaScript framework developed by Google. More precisely, we chose to use Angular to build the site’s simulator—the tool that suggests the most suitable offer for each profile after completing the questionnaire. It was primarily the speed enabled by Angular that drove our choice.

We wanted to add several features to improve the user experience. To do so, we used third-party services:

• Mailjet: an email sending solution (sending regular reminders, for example to pay fees or complete the subscription process, handling all - numerous - transactional emails sent to users);
• HelloSign: a digital contract signature solution (tool reuse and patch);
• Monetico: an online payment solution (custom module to meet our needs).

Methodology, decisions, and operation

Given the scale of the project, it was impossible to carry out all the development at once, without the constant involvement of our business contact.

The project, which was originally split into 16 phases, was completed in close collaboration to speed up deliveries and allow the new business application to go live. We would like to thank the commitment and determination of the entire project team, especially on the client side.

The application has now entered its operational and maintenance phase since we are hosting it on our private infrastructure. Now it's up to it to prove its effectiveness.

Do you have a Drupal web project in mind? Contact us to discuss it! If you are interested in business applications, we invite you to check out our case study on the project carried out for La Méridionale.

Go-live date: 04/05/2023
Website URL: lamedecinelibre.com