Small Group Medical

Quote a small group for fully insured medical health plans

Ideon's Small Group Quoting APIs deliver all available plans, their associated benefits, and premiums for a small employer, typically defined as under 50 lives, but increasing to under 100 in some states. By default, all available plans available to the group are returned for a quote. In our documentation and Postman Collections, this will commonly be referred to as "SG Medical Quoting", where "SG" is the abbreviation for "Small Group."

The v9 group quoting endpoints deliver a complete set of results in a single quote — premiums and eligibility issues are returned side by side, with no re-quoting required. Previously, plans with eligibility errors were excluded from the rates response entirely. In v9, all plans for which the group is within the service area will be returned with premiums, and any eligibility errors flagging group- or member-level issues are surfaced alongside those premiums as quote_exceptions and member_exceptions. This enables developers to build integrations that deliver premiums and eligibility warnings to end-users from any given single quote.

Pre-release documentation — The v9 group quoting endpoints are actively in development and not yet available in production. This documentation is published early so integrators can plan and scope ahead of release. Endpoint behavior, field names, and response shapes may change before general availability. For the current development status and target release date, see the Product Release Notes. To integrate against the stable version today, see the v8 documentation in Previous Versions.

Integration Summary

The core integration for SG Medical Quoting supports delivering available plans, their associated benefits, and premiums for a small employer. The workflow to quote a group through Ideon's API is best completed with a combination of a batch process at a regular cadence for plan benefit data and a 5-step call flow to quote groups in real-time.

The pages in this section detail sample requests and notes on endpoint requirements specific to small group, fully insured medical quoting. In general, these products have the least stringent requirements across group product lines. Further requirements for level funded and ancillary quoting flows are covered in their respective sections.

Cache Plan Benefits

Small Group Quotes return plan availability and premiums, but do not include full plan benefits or metadata in the response. To display complete plan details to end users, cache Ideon's full inventory of health plans and their associated benefits on a daily or weekly cadence. This enables a seamless real-time experience when presenting quoted plans. A guide to caching plan benefit inventory is detailed in the Bulk Exports section, and an overview of the benefit grammar and schema can be found in the Medical Benefit Grammar Guide section.

Quote Groups in Real Time

1. Create a Group - create a resource for a single group that serves as a basis for census data and quote creation. The group is tied to company and broker information, including a company_tax_id and one of broker_npn or agency_npn, which are required for downstream v9 quoting.

2. Add a Census - associate a census of employees and their dependents to a group.

3. Quote a Group - quote a group for coverage for a product line and market. v9 introduces a structured plan_filters object for carrier and plan filtering and an outputs object for configuring the rates response.

4. Monitor Quote Progress - poll the Show Quote endpoint for job-level and carrier-level status. v9 returns a carrier_results array summarizing which carriers Ideon is quoting, their relative status, quoting method, and per-carrier plan counts as each carrier completes.

5. Retrieve Premium and Eligibility Results - access premiums and eligibility exceptions for quoted plans. In v9, plans with group- or member-level eligibility errors are returned alongside premiums as quote_exceptions and member_exceptions, rather than being separated into a standalone limiting factors endpoint.