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Insurance Forms and Processes
Insurance related businesses are laden with paper. Insurance contracts for home, auto, boat, personal injury, public liability, and all kind of specialty matters are renewed at least annually if not more often. Every single transaction needs to be produced on paper, approved by the customer and often filed away by the customer, the agent or broker, and the insurance provider. Claims and policy processing is labor intensive and a financial pain point in the insurance industry. The information being processed is critical to both customer and insurance provider. The volume of core and supporting documents can be overwhelming. Document management software provides the ability to capture data digitally and process claims more efficiently.
Insurance customer implementation
A FileHold customer is a mid-sized specialty auto insurance broker who have 10 branches and process approximately 800 policies per month. They deal with about a dozen insurance companies that provide specialty policies to their customers who need them. They chose FileHold document management software to replace an older system that could no longer be supported. The older system did scanning and saved single page TIFF’s (Tagged Image File Format). The result was that when scanning a 10 page document, it would result in 10 individual files to struggle with.
The customer wanted to start small by purchasing FileHold Express and the bronze implementation package. Like many small companies there were no full time internal IT support staff and a trusted external IT consultant was used who was very responsive and helpful in providing the needed IT infrastructure. Once set up FileHold can be operated by any desktop computer user and is administered by a designated “System Librarian” who does not need to have a high level of IT skills.
The document scanner is a Kodak i40, a duplex scanner that scans up to 1000 pages per day, 25 pages per minute and has a small footprint. SmartSoft Capture scanning software is included in every purchase of FileHold and is used to automate the scanning processes.
In the initial training session, two schemas were set up (a schema is a type of document i.e. a standard form) for documents that are used frequently in an organization. The initial schemas were:
- Renewals - These are for the insurance renewal forms with an attached fax confirmation sheet to comply with insurance industry regulations.
- Cancellations – Used when a policy is cancelled.
These documents are frequently used and are computer printed fixed forms that make them perfect candidates for document scanning and converting into electronic form for ease of storage and retrieval. The documents share common fields that are captured as metadata in the document schema. Zonal Optical character Recognition (OCR) can be used to capture the following metadata on the computer printed forms: Date of Document, Branch Location, Customer Name, Customer Address, and Customer Number.
Originally, the plan was to have an electronic folder for each customer which would mean creating as many as 10,000 folders a year! FileHold consulting showed the customer how to use the "Views" feature to create a default view, that could then group the files by Customer Name. The use of metadata capture and the powerful search engine allows the customer to simplify the document filing process. Now they can simply store files based on Year, and not worry about having so many folders.
Future plans call for implementation of an electronic fax server to send documents directly to FileHold and eliminate the printing process completely. The company has plans for many document schemas, adding more scanning functionality and continue to convert masses amount of paper into electronic forms. FileHold scanning and imaging software can scale to meet the customers growth plans and allow them access to documents via the web from anywhere they have access to the internet.
To learn more about how insurance companies can go paperless contact [email protected].