Case Study – Health Insurance
American Medical Security
Technology Consolidation Reduces Maintenance Costs by 66%
Technology delivers an essential competitive edge, especially in highly competitive markets like insurance. To keep its technology advantage, American Medical Security (AMS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of PacifiCare Health Systems, offering medical, dental, term life and short-term disability insurance in 33 states, conducts regular reviews of all its critical technologies. For the last decade, and through its review process, AMS has selected Document Sciences to streamline policy generation. Most recently, Document Sciences was again selected for its xPression® solution after a rigorous review.
AMS needed a single, content publishing solution for its entire gamut of customer communications, including policies, statements and correspondence. "Our contract with Document Sciences was up for renewal and, as we do periodically, we went to market seeking the best, single platform solution for policy generation and other documents," explains Pete Dallman, Systems Analyst at AMS. "After a detailed RFP process and a review of about 15 vendors, we again selected Document Sciences because xPression was the only solution that met all our needs."
In addition to offering AMS the policy generation functionality they needed, xPression also met the insurer's requirement for a solution that generates both statements and policyholder correspondence. Previously, AMS used two separate software packages, each of which carried a maintenance cost. "By consolidating policy, statement and letter creation tasks on the single xPression platform, we will, when the solution is fully implemented, be able to cut overhead maintenance costs by 66%," Dallman says.
xPression's versatility enables AMS to achieve the same high degree of automation in both statement and letter generation as they have achieved in policy generation. "Depending on the statement type, xPression automatically brings in the right data from the right database and places it in the right place in a formatted statement, saving us time, and keeping costs to a minimum," Dallman added.
Another key benefit was xPression's end user interface. xPression's interface uses Microsoft Word as its authoring tool. The differentiating factor for AMS was xPression's greater flexibility enabling AMS to override certain Word functionality that otherwise would not have been easily done. "xPression easily allows documents to start with any page number, or to re-start page numbering at the beginning of new sections. These may appear to be small things, but in the context of the number of documents we produce, every edge means faster completion and faster time to market."
"Additionally, xPression was the only publishing solution that enabled a pick list of documents to be included automatically with a content package that comprises of several individual elements," Dallman explains.