Staking a Claim: OCR and the Insurance Forms Processing Payout

 

The value of insurance premiums each year is rising. It now tops $1.22 billion in the United States as residential customers look to protect homes and vehicles while business owners put safeguards in place for both physical and digital assets. 

To meet this evolving demand, insurance forms have gone digital. Busy clients expect speed and security, documents that can be completed anywhere, anytime without putting critical data at risk. At the same time, insurance providers need reliability and accuracy to ensure every form is properly analyzed, converted, and evaluated.

But with insurance forms regularly changing to meet new regulatory and compliance demands, how do companies keep pace and keep insurance forms processing on track?

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Field and Function

Forms are made up of fields, from single-line and paragraph text boxes to checklists and multiple choice questions. Effectively processing policy applications and payout claims requires multiple functions. First comes data collection, then field recognition, and finally data capture.

While manual processing remains an option, the sheer volume of fields and forms now makes this prohibitive. Compared to digital analysis, human-driven data collection is both slow and error-prone. Advanced optical character recognition (OCR) helps bridge the gap. According to Forbes, OCR is now “moving away from just seeing and matching” as technology companies develop tools capable of intelligently matching data on-demand.

This is the critical benefit of OCR for insurance forms processing; leveraging the function of digital “sight” to collect field data at scale, reducing collection times while improving contextualization.

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Evolving Expectations

To help bridge the gap between data collection and claims confirmation, digital forms developers have emerged. ACORD is one the industry’s most popular solutions, offering a wide variety of insurance eForms to help policy providers quickly capture and convert critical information. The caveat? To keep pace with evolving insurance expectations, standard ACORD forms are updated at least once per year. ACORD is also developing new data exchange standards based on microservices and RESTful APIs to help streamline processing and improve security.

The result? ACORD forms implementation isn’t fire-and-forget. Insurance providers need digital processing solutions capable of recognizing and capturing common data fields — even as form structures evolve.

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Capturing Claims

Human beings excel at pattern recognition, but often struggle to reconcile new patterns with previous expectations. This is the challenge of constantly-evolving insurance forms. Staff trained to recognize key fields in current form types may struggle to identify similar data as documents change. Standard forms processing tools often face the same problem. While they’re perfectly capable of recognizing familiar patterns, iterative changes challenge their ability to deliver consistent results.

Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms leverages advanced intelligent character recognition (ICR) for precision capture of hand-printed data, optical mark recognition (OMR) to detect bubble fields or check marks, and OCR to identify typed characters. Developers can quickly load multiple form types into the FormSuite library, allowing insurance companies to identify and pull relevant forms data, even as form structure changes. The tool also reports confidence values to share how accurate the data identification and capture was after the process.

Achieving speed, security, and accuracy at scale demands advanced forms processing technology capable of keeping pace with evolving field frameworks and data exchange standards to deliver consistent productivity payouts. Embrace change and stake your claim. Discover what you can do with FormSuite for Structured Forms.