Analysis Gives Insurer Competitive Advantage

Time lost to disability is a drain on productivity, especially during a labor market shortage.

Following the acquisition, UnumProvident supplied OCI with its entire database of approximately 3.8 million claimants. Running customer information through OCI's Report Wizard analytic and report-generating engine, Unum-Provident began supplying its customers OCI's Disability Reporting & Analysis, providing comprehensive, integrated short- and long-term disability claim management reports via the Web.

UnumProvident followed up in August 2000 with proactive analysis of disability risks, combined with suggestions to deal with them. ""The original level would give you good benchmarking, but it wasn't proactive,"" says Bruen.

The current service generates reports every two weeks, at no extra charge, for every UnumProvident customer with 100 employees or more. Each report focuses on a particular impairment. ""We send an e-mail notice to all of our thousand-or-so customers, who can then go and look it up on the Web to see where they stand with regard to that condition,"" Bruen says. The report is presented in Microsoft Excel format, allowing the customer to download and manipulate the information. ""It gives the customer flexibility: it's not just a static spreadsheet report,"" Bruen says.

Customers can define timeframes within the reports, sort by plant location and drill down for each claimant. If they have greater incidences than their industry peers for a particular condition, action plans are suggested.

Among the advantages of the service is it puts the customer and carrier on the same page in interpreting claims loss patterns, according to Bruen. ""Historically it's been challenging because the customer may run different reports,"" he says. With Report Wizard, both the customer and account manager work from the same report. ""It helps facilitate a stronger relationship. We're seeing improved loyalty and customer retention,"" Bruen says. ""The other benefit is it can help the customer lower disability costs-which also helps us achieve a better bottom line.""

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio

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