For insurance companies, onboarding new customers can be a paper-heavy process. A great deal of paperwork must be filled out and reviewed by multiple parties. Sometimes, underwriting is necessary for the customer to be approved. This article outlines how one health insurance company streamlined this process with Laserfiche Forms.

The process

The process starts when a prospective customer fills out the main application form on the company’s Website. Certain fields are marked as required so that the form cannot be submitted if they are left blank.

Once the prospect fills out the form and clicks “Submit,” the form is routed to the insurance adjuster. The adjuster is notified by e-mail that he has a new form to review. He can click on the link to access the submission directly within Laserfiche Forms.

The insurance adjuster looks over the form to make sure that it is a valid application, and he either approves or rejects it. He also checks to see if the form needs underwriting and checks the appropriate radio button.

If the form does not require underwriting, the health insurance policy is automatically issued. Otherwise, it is routed to the underwriter who must fill out an underwriting form. Some of the fields on the form are pre-populated from the insurance application.

Once the underwriting form has been submitted, it is routed to the manager for final review. If the manager approves the form, he is prompted to review the original application. Once that is approved, the policy is issued. The application is then routed to a folder in the Laserfiche repository for storage.

If the underwriting form or application is rejected, then the application is routed to a special “Rejected Applications” folder in the Laserfiche repository.

What is going on behind the scenes

The two forms are created in the Form Designer (this link requires a Laserfiche Support contract, if you would like to see a demonstration, please contact us at 347-534-1422).

Some of the fields in the form are dynamic. For example, if someone checks “Yes” in response to “Are you an existing member?” then the “Employee No. / Membership No.” field appears. If someone selects “No”, this field does not appear. These fields are configured in the “Rules” page.

The entire business process is designed in the Laserfiche Forms Process Modeler (this link requires a Laserfiche Support contract, if you would like to see a demonstration, please contact us at 347-534-1422).

This process starts when an applicant fills out the form on the company’s Website. The form is embedded on the site using the code found on the “Publish” page.

Once submitted, the form moves through the various user tasks, each one representing an action performed by the adjuster, underwriter or manager. Finally, a service task kicks off the “Insurance Application” workflow.

This workflow:

  • Extracts the values from the application and underwriting forms and converts them into tokens with the “Retrieve Form Field Content” activity.
  • Locates the actual form using the “Find Entry” activity. When configuring this activity, the following path can be used (the objects surrounded by <> should be replaced with the name of the actual object in Laserfiche Forms):<FORMSROOT><PROCESSNAME>%(formsbpinstanceid)_%(RetrieveLaserficheFormsContent__Submission Date#”MM//dd//yyyy”#)<FORMNAME>
  • Once the “Application Status” field value has been changed to either “Hired” or “Rejected” this workflow routes the job application to either a brand new employee folder or to a “Rejected Applications” folder for archival.
  • Decides whether the application was approved or rejected by the manager.
    • If rejected, the application and associated underwriting form is routed to the “Rejected Applications” folder.
    • If approved, the application and associated underwriting form is assigned the new “Insurance Application” template and then routed to the “Customers – State – Membership ID” folder. Both State and Membership ID are tokens that are retrieved from the form.

Here is what the workflow looks like:

Benefits of Laserfiche Forms

Some of the benefits provided by Laserfiche Forms include:

  • The entire application process is paperless form start to finish, which means no lost or illegible applications.
  • Dynamic fields in the form prevent applicants from getting overwhelmed with fields that may not pertain to them.
  • The integration with Laserfiche Workflow allows a seamless transition between the submission and review of the application and underwriting forms, and their storage in the Laserfiche repository. This makes the entire business process completely transparent to the users – they simply do their regular work and have Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow do all the legwork on the back-end.
  • Administrators can see and track where each application is in the process allowing them to make sure that everything is being reviewed and accomplished in a timely matter. They can then quickly locate where there are delays and address them directly with the people involved.