"This opens it up and enables everyone to deal electronically," Powell said. "Online patient verification is instantaneous at the hospital and a lot of that is manual at the moment. It will be in real time."

Powell described Eclipse as being of "tremendous benefit" to the overall industry, and once everyone is on it "the real value comes out".

Since HBA is still hooking into Cobol, it is using Microfocus to develop the modern applications with a view to Web services for linking them to a .Net-based customer front-end.

HBA chose to develop its Web applications in .Net because of its history or Visual Basic development, the "richer" development tools, and with a view to getting applications into a common architecture so components can be reused.

HBA expects its member base to reach one million members nationally, and having opened a retail presence in New South Wales late last year, the insurer anticipates the new front-end will be a platform to decrease its time to market with new offers.