Horizon Blue Cross & Blue Shield of New Jersey

Case In Point

While away from the office one busy June morning, Horizon BCBSNJ Business Continuity Manager Andre Cabaero, received an urgent call about an explosion and several rumbles outside the company’s secondary Newark location. Another call from the director of Corporate Investigations and Security quickly confirmed the office’s loss of power, though the reason remained unclear. Incident management teams worked to maintain employee safety by evacuating the buildings, while at the same time, responding to other pressing security concerns.

The Solution

The OnSolve Critical Communications system helps to ensure streamlined communications during disruptive events. In this particular situation, Horizon BCBSNJ was able to reach thousands of employees within minutes, making sure they remained informed and out of harm’s way. Once the power was restored, another alert let staff know that offices would reopen the next morning. Before implementing the system in 2008, Horizon BCBSNJ depended on slow, and sometimes unreliable, manual methods to notify employees of critical events and office closings. But as the organization’s business continuity program became more robust, Cabaero suggested Horizon BCBSNJ consider an emergency notification service as a simple backup to its existing communications processes.

The Experience

As the business continuity manager at Horizon BCBSNJ, Cabaero must ensure the organization identifies all business operations’ recovery requirements and can respond quickly to incidents that threaten critical business processes. Reliability and ease of use are of top concern when making sure employees get alerts whenever and wherever they’re needed. When Horizon BCBSNJ’s Business Continuity Management team was selecting an emergency notification provider, OnSolve stood out among competitors as a simple and customizable product that did not tack on expensive features without regard to needs or budget. “Our primary goal is to communicate messages as soon as possible to our employees,” said Cabaero. “We like the multimodal features of the system and that we can type in our own messages. The service allows us to use its customer support (to activate notifications) if we do not have access to a computer. The message can simply be read to a support representative and then sent out immediately.” Horizon BCBSNJ also uses the robust group features of OnSolve to mimic the structure of its organization within the alerting service and to target the specific individuals who need to receive any given message in a particular situation. “We’ve been happy with the service and it’s worked when we’ve needed it to,” said Cabaero. “It’s a tool that lets us reach out to our staff in a timely manner.”