A lot of my posts on this blog will talk about general concepts in the context of specific events.  Most of my experience comes through my job, so that will be the main source of the specific events.  I'll use this post to explain what my company does just so there isn't any confusion in the future.

I work at a start-up company in Park City, Utah called Zane Benefits.  I was hired as a programmer and I still spend the majority of my time writing code but I've also taken over all of the graphic design duties and I'm getting more involved in project management and marketing.

ZaneHRA

Zane Benefits writes software that employers use to administer health benefits for their companies.  This software is called ZaneHRA.  Basically, when a company realizes that their current group policy is a complete rip-off, they go looking for other options.  They find us and sign up for an HRA (Health Reimbursement Arrangement) which allows them to give a virtual health care allowance to their employees through our system.  The employees go out and buy their own individual health insurance policies and they are reimbursed by logging into their ZaneHRA accounts and submitting a claim online.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a great system but I won't get into them since this isn't really the venue.  All you need to know is that employers create a benefits plan with us and employees use our system to submit claims.

Insurance Agents

There is also a side of our software that we're expanding really aggressively.  After employers set up their HRA with us, the employees all need to buy insurance.  We have an account that insurance agents use to sell HRAs and then fulfill the insurance policies of all the enrolled participants (employees).  This is by far the most interesting part of the software from a technical standpoint because we provide the agents with all kinds of different tools.

Ok, so that's a brief summary of the company.  I'll reference this in the future when I make posts about work.