Background 

Founded in 1984, HealthMarkets, Inc. (healthmarkets.com) is a leading technology-enabled health insurance marketplace. Their proprietary technology platform, HealthMarkets Insurance Exchange, enables millions of individuals, families, and small businesses to compare, customize, purchase, and enroll in an expansive offering of health, supplemental, and other insurance products. 

HealthMarket’s mission is to provide consumers with the best protection at the best price through unparalleled convenience, choice, and counsel AND provide agents with a platform that is the most comprehensive, competitive, and contemporary in the industry. 

HealthMarket’s training team had the task of expanding and updating their eLearning course library to support a growing user-base of over 5,000 field agents. 

Business Need 

The healthcare industry is in a constant state of transformation. Mergers, acquisitions, and new state and federal regulations are having an enormous impact on these organizations. Training developers are being tasked with making frequent updates to existing courses and creating and publishing new courses quickly to keep up. 

Gregg Wright, Senior eLearning Specialist at HealthMarkets and his team of eLearning developers found themselves in this exact situation. To keep the company and service offerings competitive and their 5,000 field agents positioned to offer the best advice to customers, they needed a fast, easy way to provide the most up-to-date online training that’s critically important to HealthMarkets’ success and reputation. 

The Knowbly Solution 

Gregg was immediately impressed with the features, simplicity, and intuitive nature of Knowbly’s course development tool when he was introduced to it at a professional training conference. After trying it out himself, he was so impressed with Knowbly that he made the case to his manager to purchase the tool for him and his team. 

Gregg’s first project was to use Knowbly to develop a time-sensitive eLearning course. Knowbly’s intuitive design, customizable templates, and library of widgets (interactive elements and assessments) enabled Gregg to quickly create an effective, responsive online course that looks great across all devices and browsers. 

Use Cases 

The matrix below was created by Gregg Wright for his eLearning development team. (Bridge is their LMS.) 

• As shown, the Knowbly tool is a great fit for all project timelines and priorities – whether low, moderate, or high priority. 
• However, where Knowbly really shines is when creating eLearning courses that have both a High Priority AND have a development timeline of two weeks or less. 

HealthMarkets’ Four Favorite Knowbly Features 

HealthMarkets’ instructional design team reported that the best part of the Knowbly experience is that it is “almost intuitive to use.” It didn’t take much time or effort to get the team up-to-speed on its features and functions. 

1. No coding: The software enables course developers to quickly add high levels of interactivity without having to know how to write code like in other well-known courseware development tools.  It’s just easier to use and saves me time when I want to get a new interactive training out the door quickly. 
2. Widget library: Knowbly’s widgets add “instant interactivity.” Our instructional designers no longer have to spend lots of time creating interactivity. We just add a Knowbly widget, and the interactivity is done! 
3. Consistent look and feel: It’s easy to customize, create, and share theme templates with other users. Making all our courses have a consistent look and feel is seamless. 
4. Excellent support team and feedback is encouraged: All suggestions are welcomed by Knowbly and considered for future enhancements.   I have made a couple of suggestions to the knowbly support team, and they are always so quick to respond and let me know they appreciate my input. This is a very different attitude than other courseware companies, who never respond, or if they do, are not very courteous in their response. How I am treated as a customer is one of my reasons for staying and making the investment in Knowbly. 

Knowbly Delivers Business Results 

30 Hours of Instructor-Led Training (ILT) Converted to eLearning in Just 10 hours 

Gregg and the instructional design team at HealthMarkets tracked the conversion of 30 hours of existing Instructor-led (classroom) training to eLearning using Knowbly. The team reported that it took only 10 hours to turn the ILT course into an online training course. 

60-Slide Course Developed to 15-Minutes of eLearning in Only 1.5 Hours 

Gregg estimates it would have taken over 40 staff-hours to recreate the same course in the other eLearning development tool they have. 

Summary 

Perhaps the two best testaments from Gregg and the HeatlhMarkets team are 

1. Knowbly has been recommended to several eLearning practitioners outside his organization, and 
2. Although Gregg and his team at HealthMarkets are proficient in several industry-recognized rapid authoring tools, they have made Knowbly their new “go-to” platform of choice. 

Using Knowbly’s comprehensive suite of authoring features, Gregg and his team are planning to expand and update their eLearning course library to support their growing user-base of field agents.