Turning claims data into insights
You won’t need us to tell you that the process of claims adjusting and claims management involves a lot of data.
A lot of data comes in at the front end. There’s claims data, policy data, and data that arrives in the form of emails or via any of a range of third-party feeds. That data is likely to be distributed across multiple systems, teams, or locations. It can all too easily languish in an Excel spreadsheet unless and until someone takes the time and trouble to dig it out. And then the process of moving claims along the journey that leads from FNOL to resolution generates a whole lot more data in itself.
But all of that data only really becomes useful when it is translated into information and thence into insights.
Taking a step back, let’s define terms briefly. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to be absolutely clear about the distinction between data, information and insights. Data consists of the raw numbers captured in line with a common set of standards.
From data to insights
Turning data into information involves processing, aggregating and organising it into a series of data points that can help us understand what we’re looking at. We only get to insights once we have subjected this information to a process of analysis that helps us see what’s going on behind the data.
To put it simply, data is just numbers; information tells us what is happening; insights tell us why.
If you want to manage P&C (re)insurance claims effectively, knowing that ‘what’ is not enough – you need to understand the ‘why’ so you can take the decisions required to change what happens so that next months’ data, next year’s data will reflect a situation that’s leading your claims operation down the path that leads to an improved service for your clients and an improved bottom line for your business. Equally importantly, you need to be able to gain that understanding quickly and easily. You need those insights there at your fingertips, without having to root around for them or wait for your BI or MI team to get back to you.
Delivering actionable insights
And, that is exactly what our visual analytics platform DOCOinsights is designed to do. It’s an analytics and AI solution custom-built for P&C (re)insurance carriers that combines streamlined data collection and advanced analytics to give you meaningful, timely, actionable insights in a variety of clearly legible graphic visualisations. Having constant access to near-real-time insights generates competitive advantage by enabling you to make the right decisions at the right time.
Recognising that data comes into insurance claims operations in a wide variety of formats, we’ve designed DOCOinsights so that it can take data from virtually any source, to reflect all the sources and inputs available to you – and how much you trust them.
Along with more obvious things like SCM, ECF Financials and ECF Lead Reserve data, DOCOinsights can take data from whichever sources best suit the way you want to work. DOCOinsights ingests all this data and analyses it to provide you with interactive visualisations that enable you to drill down into the granular detail of any area of operational challenge or opportunity.
What claims managers need to know
DOCOinsights covers all the key areas P&C (re)insurance claims managers need insight into across financial trends, reserving accuracy and operational performance.
By situating claims teams’ current workload within fine-grained medium and long term financial trends, DOCOinsights enables claims managers to see easily how their team’s current workload maps against these trends.
DOCOinsights makes it easy for claims handlers who might otherwise be too focused on the detail of individual claims to see the big picture of higher-level reserving trends. It does this by assessing reserve accuracy – by class of business, carrier, handler, location, lead and following markets, third-party experts, etc. This readily accessible analysis also helps actuaries gain insight into lower-level trends.
As Peter Drucker may never actually have said, but certainly could have: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’ He could also have said that if you measure it, but you can’t see what those measurements are telling you, you still can’t manage it – at least not effectively.
DOCOinsights empowers claims managers to make the right decisions at the right time by putting the insights they need at their fingertips – in the form of easily legible, endlessly interrogable visualisations. It makes it easier for claims managers to carry out their oversight responsibilities, while ensuring consistent service and optimum performance.
The fact that claims and policy data is often split between multiple teams, carriers and databases can make it hard for claims managers to achieve a clear view across all claims activity, DOCOinsights complements our standard reporting suite by giving busy claims managers the actionable insights they need to perform at the highest level.
With the constant pressure to turn claims around faster and achieve higher closure rates, the granular measurement of strengths and weaknesses in their team’s performance is an obvious advantage. DOCOinsights also makes inconsistencies in areas like reserving and time taken to perform particular tasks readily apparent, enabling claims managers to take prompt remedial action.
Start managing claims more effectively
Obviously, there’s much more to DOCOinsights than this. This is still quite a recently launched extension to the market-leading DOCOsoft claims management system solution, but feedback from users has been very positive, (check out our series of case studies for more of those). Now is your chance to gain the competitive advantage that comes with greater insight! If you’d like to know more, contact the team today.