How to Improve Digital Collaboration for Legacy Insurance Systems

Many large insurance companies have bulky, legacy technology systems, that are hindering their ability to provide their users and customers the latest and greatest frontend applications to help streamline processes and improve collaboration. As new generation of insurtech applications are becoming available, many are not compatibles with these legacy systems.

Digital collaboration tools provide features that allow insurers to streamline workflows and improve communication both with internal stakeholders and customers. Computer systems managers can capitalize on an emerging need and establish their applications as the “new standard” for digital collaboration in the insurance industry.

Creating Better Digital Collaboration Tools for Insurtech Software

Accessible Viewing

The ability to easily access and view insurance documents is increasingly important to insurance agents and customers alike. When assembling a policy bundle, insurance agents must reference multiple pieces of information about customers as well as detailed actuarial data from a variety of sources. Many legacy systems provide only access via desktop applications and only limited file types that can be displayed. By incorporating HTML5 viewing capabilities into insurtech applications, insurance companies can help their underwriters, adjusters, and agents reference all relevant information within their existing workflow from any device (from desktop to mobile).

Customers, meanwhile, expect to be able to access their insurance records quickly and easily. Whether it’s a detailed description of their policy or a copy of their proof of insurance, they want the ability to log into a web-based application that allows them to locate and view records related to their account. This can greatly improve communication with their insurer since they’re able to quickly reference different aspects of their policy and identify their needs more clearly. Developers can build viewing features into their insurtech applications, whether webapps and/or mobile, so customers can access their essential documents without having to contact your customer support desk to get these documents.

Annotations

Building an insurance policy or evaluating claims can be a lengthy and atrocious process without the right digital collaboration tools in place. Documents often need to be reviewed by people in different departments before bundled services and rates can be finalized. If the insurtech application stack lacks adequate collaboration features, insurers may need to resort to emailing documents back and forth along with their comments or even use general annotations that could cause confusion and delay processing.

Sophisticated collaboration annotation tools allow insurers to leave detailed comments and markups for other users to review, highlight areas of concern, place predefined stamps, and provide helpful notes directly on the documents. All markups are stored separately from the original file until they need to be burned into a new copy. This protects the integrity of the source document throughout the collaboration process.

Version Control

One of the biggest challenges with digital collaboration is maintaining version control over documents. When multiple people are working on a file, it’s important to make sure that everyone is using the most up-to-date version of it. This is especially true of insurance documents because rates, policy coverage, and risk adjustments can sometimes change quite rapidly. The last thing an organization (or their customers) want is to have inconsistencies spread across several documents due to poor version control. Legacy document management systems sometimes lack proper version control functionality, relying on the user to know which versions are the most current.

Version problems are usually caused by either people downloading documents and then uploading them back to the system later, not realizing that they are not working on the most current version, or more than one person working on the same documents at the same time. By making it possible to view and annotate content within the same application, companies can help ensure that everyone is working from the most up-to-date version.

File Type Support

Insurtech applications must be able to handle a wide range of file format types to effectively facilitate collaboration. Customers and adjusters often need to upload images as part of the insurance claim and will often provide documents that are either scanned or photographed images that can’t be texted searched. Without the ability to display all these various file format types, reviewing and collaborating on documents can be nearly impossible. Additionally, many legacy systems also utilize a variety of older format types that are no longer considered standard or are even proprietary to the system.

Companies could use distinct viewers to display legacy and unique file types, but that would prevent seamless collaboration. Additionally, could use conversion tools to convert these legacy file types into PDF but that isn’t always 100% accurate and existing annotations will either not get converted or need to be burned to the document. The ideal solution is to have a document viewer that can display legacy and current file types and seamlessly annotate on both.

Boost Insurtech Stack with eViewer

MS Technology’s eViewer v7 is an Angular HTML5 that integrates smoothly into your insurtech ECM and application stack to deliver a powerful array of digital collaboration tools across any device. Using a sophisticated collection of Angular Typescript APIs, eViewer provides support for multiple file types, including MO:DCA, and can easily display and convert between formats to simplify insurance workflows. Images and documents are almost always rendered on the client’s system to offload server-side processing, allowing for a smaller server footprint and easy scalability. It also features a full range of annotation and redaction tools as well as OCR text extraction.

With over two decades of experience developing imaging and document management technology, MS Technology offers a variety of ECM integrations including IBM Content Manager 8, that can support and enhance your company’s digital collaboration efforts. From document rendering to document versioning to secure spreadsheet support, our collection of APIs can provide the features your insurtech application stack needs to meet the evolving demands of the insurance industry. To learn more about how MS Technology can help your insurance company take your insurtech to the next level, visit us at https://mstusa.com or https://eviewer.net.