Moving Insurers to the Paperless Environment

ImageRight’s Mike Fess outlines the benefits of digitizing information when it comes through the door.

Best’s Review: We’ve been talking about a paperless environment for more than a decade. How close are we?

FESS: The paperless environment is very much a reality in today’s world.
The content management solution is facilitated through the widespread use of e-mail, faxing, electronic type transmissions within the vertical, stored within the content management solution.

BR: And where does the insurance industry fit into that?

FESS: We are seeing more and more traction as the benefits can be justified. The splits in specific lines, such as personal lines where I can transmit the data throughout the chain may not necessarily need the paper. You also see from commercial lines where the data alone is not enough. The supporting documentation needs to be there.

BR: And what about the whole issue of compliance?

FESS: Compliance will drive it in two different ways. One is from a business continuity standpoint. We have learned some hard lessons on what happens when disasters occur. Then you also have legal compliance issues, Sarbanes-Oxley and other initiatives where you need to not only be able to secure the content but also be able to track the activity.

BR: People object that it’s a lot of work. What is the reality?

FESS: The paperless environment is facilitated as soon as possible, when it’s entered into the mail room or whatever that function is, to get it in electronic format. Now I have the ability from my desktop to fax, e-mail, print, utilize the workflow components, the reporting, tracking, optimizations of those flows. At that point when you realize the benefits, the cost of doing the scanning into the system is more than justified.

There are primarily two major types of content management solutions, those that are document-based and those that are file-based or file-centric. In a document-centric solution, typically you are going to require a lot of indexing overhead per document, as opposed to a file-centric system where I am going to associate with a document to the file.

BR: What don’t people understand at first about document management that eventually they come to appreciate?

FESS: One is the value of that file-centric approach. When the customer service representative or an underwriter requires a policy file, nobody goes to the file room, grabs one document and sits back down at their desk.

They want access to the entire file so they can review each medical bill, for instance, within that file or any of the endorsements.

The other one is the page-level control. When I want to send pages out of a file and I may want pages four, five, and six from this one document and from another document a couple of additional pages, I don’t want to go through the hassle of bringing each of those documents up, splitting them out and then figuring out how to send them out. I want to be able to click on the selected pages and send them out to the producer or whoever it may be.
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