Making an insurance claim is a step no business wants to take. But it’s often inevitable. No matter how robust your risk management process, accidents do happen sometimes and to help mitigate the losses, you need to be able to make insurance claims. Purchasing some insurance policies such as workers’ compensation is even required by law.
It always helps to be prepared for such a situation by setting up an effective claims management procedure. This would help you make claims processing smoother, whether you’re making the claim with one or even multiple insurance companies.
However, while a claims management process helps you be prepared to process insurance claims when needed, actually filing the claim can still be complicated and prone to errors, especially if you use manual labor. The best way to overcome these complexities and process your claims efficiently is by using insurance claims automation.
In this article, we’ll talk about what claims automation is, why automating your claims will benefit your business, and how to automate your claims process.
But first, a brief overview of what the insurance claim process actually is.
The Insurance Claim Process
Insurance claims is a multi-step process that often involves several parties including the claimant or policyholder (in this case, your business), the insurance company, an insurance broker or agent, a claims adjuster, and other third parties. Depending on the kind of insurance you’re claiming and the number of insurance policies involved, insurance claims can vary in complexity.
But the process is usually as follows:
- Once the incident occurs and you have an idea of the damage involved, you ready your documents and contact your insurance broker/administrator and they will help you make your initial insurance claim
- The insurance company reviews the claim and gathers information about the eligible damages
- An insurance adjuster would then review your insurance policy to figure out how much they owe your business
- Based on all the information gathered, the insurance provider either pays or denies your claim
Of course, once you’ve filed the claim, the process is largely out of your hands. All you can do after that is to take precautions to ensure that additional damage doesn’t occur, and keep your insurance company in the loop about any new developments related to your claim.
Why You Should Invest in Claims Automation
The claims process is not easy. A single incident can create the need for several insurance claims, and even filing one claim involves several steps. The manual work would include sending out several emails regularly (to keep stakeholders in the loop), manual data entry, and a lot of paperwork. Using a claims automation solution such as Pulpstream would help you streamline the entire process. Here are some of the benefits:
More Time to Focus on Important Business Processes
Manual claims processing is time-consuming and often tedious. Personnel whose skills are more suited to revenue-generating business processes end up spending a lot of time on the insurance claims process, which takes their time away from their business operations. With a claims automation tool, you can integrate your claims and policies into a comprehensive solution and automate everything from documentation to communications with stakeholders. This not only allows you to resolve the claim quickly but also frees up your team to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities. In a nutshell, automation would increase productivity and also reduce your operating costs.
Reduced Human Error
Filing claims and handling all the related documentation manually is not only time consuming and inefficient but prone to errors. With the sheer amount of unstructured data and documentation to consolidate, it’s easy to make mistakes. You may forget to include a specific damage. Contacting the insurance adjuster about a new development may just slip your mind.
While that is understandable considering many steps involved in the claims process, it may still be damaging to your business. Automation eliminates this issue as you can upload all your documentation and evidence in real time and set up reminders and automated notifications to stakeholders so that the communication is taken care of.
Advanced Analytics and Decision-Making
Intelligent automation does more than save you from the tedium of using spreadsheets to take care of all your insurance claims — you can use claims automation solutions to help you with decision making and incident analytics as well. Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, a claims automation platform like Pulpstream would help you with:
- Reports (including your incident report and your claims documentation)
- Analyzing any trends to fix gaps in your risk management
- Tracking payments and expenses related to the claim and consolidating invoices to send to the insurance company
- Automatically creating graphs and tables to make it easier to visualize your data and find patterns
All this is typically available on a single, user-friendly dashboard and will help you process your claims faster and more efficiently.
Streamlined Stakeholder Communication
Throughout your claims process, it’s vital to keep your insurers informed about every development. There are often several people you need to notify and missing even one may affect your claim. Keeping track of who needs to be notified and when is difficult, and doing so manually can easily lead to mistakes.
Claims automation can help you with this as well, as a claims management solution would enable you to automate messages to insurance providers as well as any other stakeholders. If unique messages are needed that can’t be automated, the platform could be set up to send regular reminders to communicate with relevant parties.
How to Automate Your Claims Process
It can be surprisingly easy to automate your claims management. All you really need to do is invest in a claims automation solution. Explore the options available in the market and look for a solution that provides a good claims experience. Here are some functionalities and features you can look for:
- Uploading and storage of documentation in all formats such as insurance policies, invoices, etc.
- Analytics capabilities that helps with identifying relevant insurance policies as well as claims trends
- Automated claims-related expense tracking
- Automated communication with insurers and other stakeholders
- Platform-based communication with any injured employees
- Automated incident reporting
In short, you’re looking for an ecosystem that includes all relevant workflows and processes related to filing your insurance claim. Once you’ve zeroed in on a few platforms to choose from, you can start narrowing down your options by looking at customer experience reviews and pricing.
Pulpstream is one such claims automation solution that has all the above capabilities and much more, all within a single platform. Check it out now with a free demo!
