Related Items
The Outlook is Bright for CUNA Mutual Group
August 2007The relationship between IT and the business within insurance companies is a subject insurance professionals will talk about until the cows come home. How do the two work together? Who are the forward thinkers? How does IT know what the business needs and vice versa? These questions plague both sides. CUNA Mutual Group, Madison, Wis., may have figured it out. In fact, this epiphany helped win the company Insurance Networking News' 2007 INNovator of the Year award for its ability to successfully combine the efforts of IT and the business to create a specialized claims processing solution, Claims Express.
"We're (business and IT) part of the same team," says Tom Gosnell, CIO at CUNA Mutual. "I think it's that close working relationship that helps best position us to be able to share ideas with the business and vice versa and to be able to come up with the right solution across the board."
Within IT, Gosnell focuses on innovation. "We [IT] actually get to see a lot of things happening across the company and aren't necessarily focused in any one area [of the business]," he says. "So we can bring some good innovative ideas to the marketplace."
One such innovation is a call center credit union members can connect with to obtain information about their credit union and perform transactions.
Innovation is not new to CUNA Mutual, which provides insurance and other financial services to the credit union marketplace. About a year and a half ago, the company was faced with a challenge-a three-year back-office customer transformation effort that included consolidating 50 call centers into three customer contact centers (one in Waverly, Iowa, one in Madison, and one in Fort Worth, Texas) and consolidating policy administration systems, says Gosnell.
About two and a half years before this transformation effort was introduced-with implementation help from MajescoMastek, Mumbai, India-CUNA Mutual set out to improve its claims process and design a claims system for the whole company by creating the Claims Express system, according to Craig Everson, IT manager for the Claims Express product, CUNA Mutual. "We quickly realized that was not going to happen in a timeframe that made sense," he says. So the focus was shifted to its business with the most opportunity-the credit life and disability.
ACCURACY AND SCALABILITY
CUNA Mutual's new goal was to automate the labor-intensive process where a large group (150 processers) had to hand-craft every claim.
The IT team was looking for even more innovation from the Claims Express system-accuracy and scalability. "When we encountered a claims backlog, it created pressure on our staff to pay them quickly rather than take necessary time to research how much should be paid or whether they should be paid at all," says Everson.
Partnering with the business unit, the IT team set out to ensure the system and its processes continued to improve payment accuracy. The team revamped the processes within the claims system, implementing new reporting, new analytics and new integration with third-party medical databases. They also integrated industry best practices within the Claims Express system.
CUNA Mutual automated its data collection process-from automated intake of claims to streamlining parameters between a claims payment and the original contract information. To provide immediate payments for less complex claims, the team developed business rules to automatically pay the credit union member. This new procedural change meant that the company could begin processing 20% of all claims automatically, according to Everson.
For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:
Spotlights
- About Us
- Advertising Media Kit
- Reprints
- Editorial Calendar
- Contact Us
- Customer Service
- Privacy Statement
©2008 Insurance Networking News and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.
SourceMedia is an Investcorp company.
Use, duplication, or sale of this service, or data contained herein, is strictly prohibited.
