6 mo
Jan 2023 → Jun 2023 delivery
Case study · Payers
Custom CRM in 6 months — off the per-seat treadmill, on a private server.
A California health-insurance company needed a CRM their account managers would actually use — without paying per-seat for bloated off-the-shelf platforms. We built it custom on a private server, HIPAA-compliant, with workflows mapped directly to their lead-to-customer journey.
Case · Payers
shippedCalifornia, USA · Health Insurance
0
recurring third-party CRM fees
5
specialists on the engagement
HIPAA
PHI handling on private infrastructure
Stack·
CakePHP · PostgreSQL · Angular
6 mo
Jan 2023 → Jun 2023 delivery
0
recurring third-party CRM fees
5
specialists on the engagement
HIPAA
PHI handling on private infrastructure
The challenge
Three problems — all at once.
The insurer's account managers needed a digital workflow for managing leads, opportunities, and customers — but off-the-shelf CRMs like Salesforce were too feature-heavy and too expensive at scale. Per-seat costs were a constant tax on team growth.
PHI handling required HIPAA-grade controls — encryption, least-privilege access, audit trails, automatic logout — which off-the-shelf SaaS imposed only via expensive enterprise tiers.
Insurance workflows (AEP / OEP enrollment, Medicare Beneficiary Identifier, healthcare proxies, primary care physician routing) didn't map cleanly onto generic CRM data models — meaning agents would spend time fighting the tool instead of working leads.
What we did
Seven specific things.
- 01Designed the data model around the insurer's actual workflow: Lead → Opportunity → Customer, with state machines for contact, convert, and lost transitions
- 02Built lead-capture from two sources: public web form with explicit consent capture, and manual agent entry
- 03Implemented role-based access control with least-privilege defaults, password rotation, and 15-minute idle logout
- 04Built searchable account views with filters by date, status, assignee, source — plus a full interaction timeline and document history per account
- 05Added insurance-specific reporting: AEP/OEP success rates, monthly lead and opportunity counts, lead-to-closed and opportunity-to-closed ratios
- 06Deployed on the client's private server — eliminated recurring monthly SaaS fees; client pays hosting and maintenance only
- 07Ran user-testing across multiple UI iterations with insurance agents until the system maximized usability — not vendor checkbox completeness
Tech stack
CakePHPPostgreSQLAngularFigma
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