Building the Partnership Behind HPS’s Modern Member Experience
HPS needed to modernize its member portal without diverting its technology team from the mission-critical systems powering the business. The challenge was finding the right product-engineering capacity and learning how to make two teams work as one.
Health Payment Systems (HPS) operates a healthcare financing model that pays providers on behalf of members and gives patients flexibility in managing their financial responsibilities. Its technology supports complex claims, payment, and transaction workflows. Yet members increasingly expect the intuitive, mobile-friendly self-service they receive from other financial platforms. For HPS, modernizing the portal promised more than a new interface. It offered a better way for members to manage payments and for employees to spend less time handling routine requests.
Members
Flexibility in managing their financial responsibilities
HPS
Pays providers on behalf of members
Providers
Paid by HPS
Novelty joined HPS to help make that possible. Its engineers brought deep healthcare-domain knowledge alongside modern product engineering, architecture, and development capabilities. The goal was not to replace HPS’s internal technology organization, which remained responsible for essential operational systems. It was to extend what the organization could build while keeping ownership of its technology, data, and business priorities.
Complementary expertise, aligned over time
Healthcare knowledge gave Novelty a head start, but understanding the industry was not the same as understanding HPS. Delivering a new member experience meant learning the company’s financial workflows, underlying systems, users, and decision-making practices. It also meant working out how two capable organizations would translate business goals into requirements, documentation, testing, and releases.
That alignment developed over time. HPS brought technology and product leadership closer to the work, while Novelty strengthened its engineering leadership, communication, and delivery practices. With senior engineering leads more directly engaged, the teams became clearer on how to share context, make decisions, and evaluate quality. They also created room for a more valuable contribution from Novelty: solving for the business outcome rather than implementing a list of features.
As the working relationship matured, Novelty moved closer to the underlying business problem instead of working downstream from isolated technical requests. HPS could explain what members needed to accomplish or where an operational process caused friction, and Novelty could help translate that context into the right product and system response.
Modernizing the member experience
The portal is an important point of contact between HPS and its members. For a business built around helping patients manage healthcare costs, an intuitive digital experience is a practical part of member engagement, not an aesthetic extra. Novelty’s product engineering needed to do more than update screens. It needed to make complex financial workflows easier to understand and use.
The expanded portal lets members review what they owe, make payments, choose between ACH and credit cards, establish payment plans, and adjust those plans as circumstances change. Tasks that once required a phone call can be handled directly through the desktop or mobile portal experience.
Phone call
Tasks that once required a call to HPS
Desktop or mobile portal
Handled directly by members
- 1Review what they owe
- 2Make payments
- 3ACH or credit card
- 4Establish payment plans
- 5Adjust plans as circumstances change
That self-service capability supports HPS operations as well as members. It can reduce routine phone interactions, give finance teams quicker visibility into digital payment activity, and encourage lower-cost payment methods such as ACH where appropriate. The expanded experience has been live for several months, and Bob reports a positive response from HPS leadership, operations, and finance.
From engineering capacity to strategic partnership
Novelty’s growing familiarity with HPS’s systems, users, workflows, and priorities gives the combined team a stronger starting point for what comes next. HPS maintains ownership of its technology and strategy while gaining engineering partners who can help define solutions, not only deliver them. Together, the teams can explore further improvements in member engagement, operational efficiency, and the digital capabilities that support growth.
That is the larger lesson of the partnership. Industry expertise may open the door, but strategic technology relationships are built through shared understanding, complementary strengths, consistent communication, and mutual trust. When those elements come together, the distinction between “internal” and “external” matters less than the quality of what the combined team can build.
“Over the past year, Novelty has become a different kind of partner for us. The work has been outstanding, and today we see them as a stable, reliable part of our technology organization.”
Bob Chin, Health Payment Systems
Chief Information Officer
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