United Educators Insurance (UE), a specialty insurer for educational institutions, has replaced a complex paper-based system for policy renewals with an automated forms management portal. The new system, built by The Revere Group, an NTT Data Company, has trimmed time, risk and complexity from the insurer’s policy renewal process. The system was built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. “It’s not just a portal, it’s a portal infused with workflow,” explained Alex Zatuchny, executive vice president and the solutions practice lead with The Revere Group. “Their renewal forms are very complicated.”

UE first approached The Revere Group with the portal idea, according to Zatuchny, because their policies, which have to be renewed annually, involve multiple parts that often have to be filled out by different people.

“Because we’re a niche insurance provider with a more extensive product line for education, we need a lot more detail than a general purpose insurer would,” said Bryan Elie, association vice president of underwriting for UE. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for our members and brokers to provide that information.”

Through the portal solutions, a policy is posted to the portal, and different users can access it to fill out only the portions of the policy that are relevant to them. Four months prior to a policy’s expiration, UE sends an email message to the educational institution and the appropriate broker. The email message contains a link to an electronic version of the policy renewal form on the portal site.

The broker and the educational institution might each have different fields that they are able to change in the document. More importantly, an application administrator at the educational institution can then allow different people from different departments within the school to access the portions of the document that they need to update, without seeing the portions that don’t pertain to them. This is in contrast to the prior system, where someone at an educational institution might have had to distribute paper versions of the document’s different sections to different people within the school. The prior method had been time consuming, as all the different sections and forms had to be collected and organized into one document to be sent back to the insurer.

The new system allows UE to distribute policy renewals more directly, and because its easier to send different portions to different people, the sections are being filled out more completely, which has helped to improve accuracy. UE can also view the progress of each policy renewal more easily. One of the features of the new system that has been particularly useful is that the new system allows the company to capture and analyze data electronically.

“We now have data that we can use for benchmarking schools, which will help us do better risk management,” said Christine Uzzell, associate vice president of information technology for UE.

The flexibility of the Microsoft software will also allow UE to easily extend the application.

www.reveregroup.com

www.ue.org