By Taylor Trapani, Marketing Associate
If you’re only as good as the tools you’re using, then your life insurance software needs to be pretty stinkin’ amazing.
Attending physician statements (APS) are a monstrous obstacle. They average 250 pages, but some can reach 11,000! To put it simply it can take a long time to review APSs, and time is something that none of us like to give much of (time=$$$).
With time being so precious, does your life insurance software optimize it? Here are seven time-saving features that every life insurance software should have.
1) Automated Client Information Capture: a method of capturing data. It either happens with the client (i.e. a mobile application that allows clients to apply from virtually anywhere) or once the client submits their paperwork (i.e. run all documents/content through a capture solution to extract the information).
2) Document Classification: workflow rules that verify that you collected all the necessary documents from your clients and that the correct documents make it into the corresponding client folder. This feature should also be intelligent enough to classify each document based on the data in a document.
For example, it can determine if a document is a doctor’s note or a prescription. This saves time by preventing underwriters from hunting for documents or reading the information on the document to determine what it is.
In addition, your life insurance software should allow users to perform various document management tasks in parallel to avoid bottlenecks within the organization. It should also incorporate case management methodologies.
3) High-Speed Document Viewer: Did you know that the average document viewer takes six seconds to load a large document, but there are some (*cough, cough* like ours) that only take one second? Six seconds may not seem long, but when you open documents day in and day out six seconds is a long time to wait.
Try it yourself. Open a Word doc and see how fast that is. Now compare it to six seconds – go ahead, try – I’ll wait.
4) Cognitive Medical Extraction: Out-of-the-box extractors from a technology like IBM Datacap Insight Edition pull information like date, location, last name, etc. from documents. Custom medical extractors are specific to medical terminology. This means the capture solution extracts information that is actually relevant to underwriters like medical diagnoses, doctors’ names, lab results, prescriptions, and chronic conditions.
In our own solution, Life Underwriting solution, it can even distinguish between doctor name and patient name and identify duplicate documents. And because this is a cognitive technology, the more applications that go through Datacap, the more it learns how an underwriter thinks.
5) The Ability to Fast-Track Applications: Our Life Underwriting solution is a software that organizes and presents extracted data. If an applicant meets certain criteria or does not have specific ailments, or is young and has a healthy lifestyle, our solution fast tracks the application so your experienced underwriters don’t spend time reviewing something that’s an easy approval – they only spend time reviewing the more complex applications. Life insurance software that fast-tracks applications is sure to set the organization’s organic growth on the fast track too.
6) Actionable Reports and Notepads: If you look at the image below, you can see a list of actionable and completed tasks. Life insurance software that displays reports and makes it possible to launch tasks from the reports saves time and gives underwriters instant insight. An applicant timeline like the one below gives users one-click access to documents so they can easily review, annotate, or bookmark them.
7) Bookmarks: digital bookmarks for document pages. Bookmarks are a simple way to instantly jump to important information on all documents. For example, an underwriter could bookmark a test result or a diagnosis so when they want to look deeper into that information, they can click on the bookmarks and it takes them right to that page. This helps underwriters quickly navigate through the document.
These game-changing features streamline the life underwriting process. They maximize fast-track applications and ease the burden of complex ones. Organizations that master this excel in the industry because they’re able to grow organically.
To learn more about life insurance software solutions like our Life Underwriting solution, watch a recent webinar we did with IBM: “ECM at Work for the Insurance Industry.”
About the author: My favorite thing about working at Pyramid Solutions is that every day I learn, which keeps me motivated and excited to come to work. After the work day, you can always find me at the gym.