Technical FAQs
When it comes to the COVID-19 crisis, the only constant is change. As noted by Insurance Business Magazine, this creates a “growing opportunity” for insurance firms to embrace digital transition and improve their processes — provided they can quickly embrace insurance claim form automation to underpin underwriters’ efficiency.
This is no small task. From legacy systems that were never designed to live on cloud networks to proprietary processing solutions that are struggling with handprinted forms and multiple file formats, health insurance agencies now recognize the need for efficient, accurate, and complete forms processing — but often lack the backend infrastructure to make remote data capture a reality.
Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms can help bolster digital backends and build out insurance data collection capacity with efficient information capture, reliable structured form field recognition, quick data verification, and multiple form identification to both streamline forms processing and support the “new normal” of health insurance operations.
Managing Healthcare Data Analytics During COVID-19
Crisis conditions are rapidly evolving. From dynamic case variables to emerging equations that govern policy and coverage requirements, it’s critical for insurance companies to have systems in place that allow for capture and routing of this data quickly and accurately, in turn empowering actuaries to create cutting-edge risk models.
This is especially critical as healthcare costs continue to rise. According to a recent data brief, uninsured patients could face medical bills of more than $74,000 if they experience major complications, while the International Travel and Health Insurance Journal (ITIJ) reports a rising demand for more comprehensive employer-sponsored healthcare policies to help offset out-of-pocket COVID-19 costs.
As a result, it’s critical for companies to focus on the certainties of the current claims continuum: the crisis isn’t static, customer satisfaction is paramount, and comprehensive forms capture across four key functions defines the first step toward improved data analysis and risk modeling.
1) Efficient Information Capture
On-demand information capture underpins effective analytics, in turn empowering agents with the critical information needed to provide best-fit coverage recommendations and ensure high customer satisfaction. Even prior to the COVID crisis, 61 percent of consumers said they wanted the ability to submit and track claims online. But nine out of ten firms lack the in-house ability to process these forms and capture this data at scale, let alone empower staff to do so at a distance.
FormSuite for Structured Forms provides a software-driven solution to this challenge with the ability to automatically capture forms data using a combination of OCR, ICR, and OMR technologies, making it possible to quickly and accurately record everything from phone numbers and signatures to hand-printed text fields. For actuaries, agents, and underwriters this reduced reliance on manual processes shortens the distance between data information and insight, allowing staff to better serve customer needs with custom-built health policies.
2) Reliable Form Field Recognition
Poorly-constructed fields represent a real problem for insurance data capture and accuracy. Consider common form characteristics such as comb lines or character boxes. If comb lines are too close together or too short, they will not be recognized. They should be at least half the height of any expected character. Accurate, automated reading may be difficult. When it comes to character boxes, meanwhile, rectangular boxes higher than they are wide can result in compressed characters that are challenging to identify. Even paper thickness and bleed-through can cause form field frustrations, in turn reducing overall claims throughput.
Solving this problem starts with improved form frameworks. Insurers are often best-served by leveraging the latest ACORD standards to ensure claims documentation construction is both current and comprehensive. But in a world driven by socially-distant technology solutions, companies must also account for the expanding volume of new forms used by clients and third-party providers alike. Recent PWC data found that “clunkiness and redundancy” remain common across insurance forms. As a result, it’s critical to deploy SDK solutions capable of streamlining form recognition to ensure staff spend less time checking and re-checking paperwork and more time writing new policies.
3) Confident Data Verification
Data confidence is critical for success, especially when it comes to capturing data from hand printed or scanned insurance forms. Even small errors can cause big problems — if applicant data is incorrectly entered or policy values aren’t accurate, insurance companies lose the information confidence required to drive strategic analytics at scale.
Confidence values provide the critical connection between OCR assessment and data output. Described on a scale from 0 to 100, higher numbers represent greater likelihood of character accuracy, while lower values indicate a “suspicious” character that may require secondary analysis. FormSuite for Structured Forms allows developers to customize key confidence thresholds that trigger notifications — if characters are deemed suspicious, they can be flagged for further review to ensure data is completely accurate.
4) Multiple Forms Identification
According to the World Insurtech Report 2020, the shift from corporate operations to home offices has accelerated digital insurance innovation, with 60 percent of firms launching in-house innovation teams to help embrace the need for technology-first, customer-facing processes.
The caveat? These initiatives are only successful with backend processes support, specifically in the area of forms recognition. As noted above, while industry-standard forms remain the ideal iteration for claims processes, pandemic priorities have compelled rapid adaptation as both staff working environments and consumer expectations evolve. To meet emerging demand, firms must be prepared to regularly create, vet, and verify new form templates on-demand.
Advanced optical character recognition is critical to bridge the gap between scanned forms and current templates by ensuring correct formats are quickly identified and efficiently routed. Formsuite for Structured Forms also takes this process a step further with the ability to accurately detect and align form templates even if they’re rotated, skewed, or scaled.
Solving for Structural Integrity
Structural integrity is essential for insurance success in the age of COVID-19. To achieve this goal, firms can’t simply focus on front-line functions. Other critical steps include needing to bolster back-end forms processing and bridge functional gaps, empowering staff to capture data, identify form fields, achieve higher character confidence values, and identify document formats on-demand. Ready to streamline claims processing? Download your free trial of FormSuite for Structured Forms.
The scalable vector graphic (SVG) format continues to enjoy steady adoption across the web. According to data from W3Techs, SVG now accounts for 25 percent of website images worldwide. But it wasn’t always this way. In 1998, it became apparent that vector-based graphics had a future on the web, and the W3C received six different file format submissions from technology companies that year. Some were mere proposals ready for a complete revamp, while others were proprietary products that W3C wasn’t permitted to modify. Instead of forging a format from one of the submissions, however, W3C’s SVG working group decided to start from the ground up — and SVG was born.
While the file format had lofty ambitions, focusing on common use rather than specific syntax, the original iteration was cumbersome and complex. However, SVG has improved year after year after year. With increased support came more streamlined functionality and usable features. Now, SVG is often the first choice for meeting the evolving demands of scalable, responsive, and accessible web content.
What is a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) and how does it work?
Today, SVG is the de-facto standard for vector-based browser graphics. But what exactly is this file format, and how does it work?
Based on XML, SVG supports three broad types of objects:
- Vector graphics including paths and outlines that are both straight and curved
- Bitmap images such as .jpeg, .gif, and .png
- Text
What sets SVG apart from bitmap-based images is the use of lines and curves along the edges of graphical objects. Because bitmap images use a fixed set of pixels, scaling them up creates blurriness where the edges of pixels meet. In the case of vector images, meanwhile, a fixed-shape approach allows the preservation of smooth lines and curves no matter the image size.
SVG also offers the benefit of interoperability. Because it’s a W3C open standard, SVG plays well with both other image format and web markup languages including JavaScript, DOM, CSS, and HTML. This allows the format to easily support responsive design approaches that scale websites and web content based on the user device rather than defining standardized size parameters. Thanks to the curves and lines of SVG, scaling presents no problem for responsive designers looking to ensure consistency across device types.
The Benefits of SVG
While scalability is often cited as the biggest benefit of SVG, this format also offers other advantages, including:
- Responsiveness — Images can be easily scaled up or down and modified as necessary to meet web design and development demands.
- Accessibility — Since SVG is text-based, content can be indexed and searched, allowing both users and developers to quickly find what they’re looking for.
- Performance — Image rendering is quick and doesn’t require substantive resources, allowing sites to load quickly and completely.
- Use in Web Applications — Browser incompatibilities and missing functions often frustrate web design efforts, forcing developers to use multiple tool sets and spend time checking content and images for potential format conflicts. SVG, meanwhile, offers powerful scripting and event support, in turn allowing developers to leverage it as a platform for both graphically rich applications and user interfaces. The result? Better-looking sites that enhance the overall user experience.
- Interoperability — Because SVG is based on W3C standards, the format is entirely interoperable, meaning developers aren’t tied to any specific implementation, vendor, or authoring tool. From building their own framework from the ground up to leveraging third-party SVG applications, web developers can find their format best-fit.
SVG in PrizmDoc Viewer
Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer offers multiple ways for developers to make the most of SVG elements at scale, such as:
- File Transformation — Conversion is critical for effective and efficient web design. If development teams need different file transformation tools for every format, the timeline for web projects expands significantly. PrizmDoc Viewer streamlines this process with support for the conversion of more than 100 file types — including PDFs, Microsoft Office files, HTML, EML, rich text, and images — into browser-compliant SVG outputs. In practice, this permits near-native document and image rendering that’s not only fast, but also accessible anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
- HTML5 Functionality — Using SVG in PrizmDoc Viewer is made easier thanks to native HTML5 design. The use of HTML5-native framework not only improves load times with smaller document sizes but means that PrizmDoc Viewer works in all modern web browsers — while also dramatically enhancing document display quality.
- Pre-Conversion — One of the biggest challenges with viewing large documents in a browser is delay. Pages toward the end of the document may take longer to load and frustrate users looking to quickly find a specific image or piece of information. PrizmDoc Viewer solves this problem with a pre-conversion API that returns the first page as an SVG while the rest of the document is being converted, allowing users to interact with documents as conversion takes place and lowering the chance that files will experience format-based delays.
SVG hasn’t always been the go-to web image format. Despite a promising start based on open, interoperable standards, the lack of early support and specific use cases for vector-based file formats saw SVG sitting on the sidelines for decades.
The advent of on-demand access requirements and mobile-first development realities has changed the conversation. SVG is now continuously gaining ground as companies see the benefit in this scalable, streamlined, and superior-quality file format. Get the big picture and see SVG in action with our online document viewing demo, or start a free PrizmDoc Viewer trial today!
TAMPA, Fla. September 9, 2020 – In August, Tampa Bay Tech’s Software CEO Council (TBSC) met to tackle what so many CEOs and founders are experiencing right now as the country continues to reopen. The outlook was optimistic amongst the group as all attendees reported that their businesses were maintaining financial stability and growing headcount.
During this quarterly meeting, TBSC usually gathers to discuss business ideas, philanthropic efforts, and community involvement. This meeting was a little different considering the effects that COVID-19 has had on the market.
“It’s important for TBSC to keep our meetings going, especially during a pandemic,” states Seng Sun, CEO of SunView Software. “We can rely on each other to share feedback and ideas regarding the management of new COVID-19 protocols.”
Prior to the meeting, the members participated in a brief survey about the impact that the pandemic had on their businesses.
“Across the board our CEOs reported challenges in the past several months, but I was encouraged by the optimism for not only ending the year in a positive place, but heading into 2021 with solid strategies to grow,” reported Jill St Thomas, Tampa Bay Tech’s Executive Director. “The commitment of these leaders to support one another absolutely embodies our mission of building a radically connected tech community in Tampa Bay.”
“We need to understand the way the pandemic has influenced not only our own business plans and strategies, but how it will affect the technology landscape in Tampa Bay,” states Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft. “We have light-hearted meetings, but we do discuss serious subjects. I took over a page of notes on ideas my peers shared, and I’m interested in implementing them across my teams.”
Members of the group in attendance included: Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft, Kevin Coppins, CEO of Spirion, Seng Sun, CEO of SunView Software, Ed Holmes, CEO of FairWarning, Gregory Ross-Munro, CEO of Sourcetoad, Paul Toomey, CEO of Geographic Solutions, Chris Karlo, CEO of Mercury New Media, Jody Haneke, CEO of Haneke Designs, and moderator, Jill St. Thomas, Executive Director of Tampa Bay Tech.
For more information about TBSC, visit the group’s website at https://www.tampasoftwareceos.com/.
About Tampa Bay Tech
Tampa Bay Tech is a 501(c)6 non-profit technology council that has been engaging and uniting the local technology community for 20 years. With over 100 companies representing thousands of tech employees – as well as thousands of students within the area’s colleges and universities – Tampa Bay Tech provides programming and initiatives to support all those in the technology space. Through their membership and partnerships, their mission is to build a radically connected, flourishing tech hub where opportunity is abundant for all. Join the TBTech community at tampabay.tech and follow us on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and Twitter.
About Accusoft
Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.