Manage claims more efficiently with integrated data, automation, and real-time information.
The insurance industry is complex and dynamic with many stakeholders and regulations involved in operations. Project management has thus become increasingly important as insurance service companies work to reduce costs, streamline processes, and manage risk while delivering best results.
Project management helps them hone their competitive edge with stellar customer service, efficiency in delivery, and cost containment. It also ensures regulatory compliance.
But project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and your project manager needs a claims management system to access all pertinent information and become as efficient as possible. These solutions help insurance services companies more easily manage their processes as well as automate data capture, validation, processing, and analysis. Good project management combined with a claims management system enhances collaboration, helps manage risk, and informs decision-making.
Here’s what you need to know about how claim management systems can help.
How claims management systems and project management work together
A claims management system is a transaction-enabled system that gathers and processes information about policy and coverages, claims, and claimants, and then evaluates and analyzes the circumstances of the claims. These systems standardize the claims process, reduce costs, increase productivity, and increase customer satisfaction.
Simply having a claims management system isn’t enough, however. Project management can solve many common issues that are part of the claims process, including:
- Communication to set customer expectations
- Poor documentation
- Extended timelines
- Keeping relations cordial
Project managers keep things on task while minimizing adversarial interactions. Here’s a look at some of the benefits your team will experience by adding a claims management system to your project management efforts:
- Collaboration and communication
Project management ensures projects stay on track by effectively facilitating communication and collaboration. Collaborating with colleagues and outside consultants assures that everyone understands the end goal and their contributions toward it.
- Risk management
A claims management system gives complete visibility into your data so you gain actionable insights using advanced analytics. It pulls data from a centralized location to capture everything related to the claim, allowing project management to work with risk managers to track liabilities, communicate with third parties, and clue in colleagues with every aspect of the claim. Checkpoints integrated into the system means critical data is always both noted and addressed.
- Reporting and analysis
Your project managers need the right reports – such as loss histories and property reports – to track progress and manage resources and money. Such reports provide data on every claim to help optimize operations, boost customer service levels, reduce fraud, and decrease expenses. These reports and their analysis then inform decision-making in real time.
Giving your project management team a claims management system means project progress can be tracked with complete transparency, so issues can be identified and solved promptly. But all of these helpful features depend on one key thing: integration.
How claims management systems help you get the full picture
Your insurance services firm likely has a customer relationship management platform (CRM) as well as one for enterprise resource planning (ERP). Your CRM has some of your customer information and your ERP has more, plus essential financial information.
Integrating claims management systems with ERPs and CRMs provides centralized access for everyone on your team, including project managers, with direct and centralized access to the information they need to do their job. This results in:
- Greater data visibility
Information siloed in different systems makes getting a comprehensive view challenging. Integration provides a unified view of the entire claim, including risk, so you can make better decisions. - Increased efficiency and productivity
Risk and claims management is more efficient because tasks that result in errors are eliminated. Data is in the right format for processing, too, and is consolidated with no manual processing. - Enhanced collaboration
A single claims management system platform means departmental and functional barriers are eliminated (along with data silos). Project management can then easily reorganize workflows, and collaboration is improved. - Actionable insights
A claims management system allows you and project management to leverage analytics for data-driven decisions that deliver the best results. Real-time access to information enables better resource allocation, claim development predictions, and automated workflows. - Improved outcomes
Your team gains the ability to improve claim outcomes by allowing claims managers to focus and close claims quickly and effectively. - Better customer service
Customers have high expectations and want instant results. Claims management systems give project management teams the information to keep customers informed and tailor services to meet their needs.
Integration is the only way to get your business to be more efficient, productive, and profitable. That’s not to say integration is not without challenges.
What to know about integration challenges and solutions
Integration means moving all of your data to one platform for easy access and silo elimination. One of the challenges of data integration is format. Your firm has data from multiple locations that must be converted to a format compatible with claims management systems.
Such problems can be solved with middleware, which is software that spans the gaps in applications, tools, and databases to create a unified service. Application programming interface(APIs) can also be used for data exchange between two systems, and can add a trigger that automatically updates data in both applications if a change is made in one of them.
API integration with automation ensures data integrity and creates a single source of truth for everyone in your firm. Adoption of data standards is also important, specifically:
- Fields you want to collect
- How fields relate to each other
- Whether the data type in a field needs to be text, a number, or something else
- Validation rules
- Where and how data needs to map to other systems
- And more
Once implemented, data standards will capture the context of every workflow, seamlessly communicate with your entire tech stack, minimize duplication and inconsistencies, and maximize usability.
The importance of system integration can’t be overemphasized, because it accelerates the flow of information and reduces operational spend. Project management will then have increased productivity, better information to work with, and the tools to improve customer satisfaction and retention.
The right software development partner matters
If you’re ready to explore how a claims management system can improve your operations and boost your project managers’ productivity, Susco can help. For more than a decade, our dedicated team of web and application developers have built custom solutions that perfectly align with business goals.
Discover what we can do for you. Get in touch today so we can schedule your free one-hour assessment and get you on your way to faster, better, stronger, team and boosted revenues.