Beacon Mutual Wins 2015 IASA Technology Innovation Award

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

Following the Insurance Accounting & Systems Association (IASA) Annual Conference and Business Show that took place this past June, there were three finalists in the running for the 2015 IASA Technology Innovation Award. This month, Beacon Mutual was declared the winner.

Both the IASA and Ward Group, groups that seek to educate insurance professionals about industry standards and maintain industry research benchmarks, announced in early November that Beacon took home the prize. The award is presented, each year, to the business that best demonstrates its use of innovative technology to further its operations. Alongside the other finalists at a separate IASA convention in September, EDGE, Beacon showed a panel of judges just how it has used software to handle workers’ compensation claims.

IASA CEO Carlos Correa commented on the difficulty of selecting the winner – citing the growing use of innovative software in the insurance market.

“In addition to Beacon Mutual’s award winning initiative we also want to recognize the outstanding accomplishments of the other finalists for their innovative application of technology,” Correa said. “It gets more difficult each year to choose among the many outstanding submissions, demonstrating how insurers are truly embracing and successfully implementing new technologies and processes to change how they are doing business to meet and exceed business objectives.”

Beacon’s use of compensation claim-handling software allows policy holders to use a Web-based interface to initiate claims. For the time being, the online system only handles medical-only claims, which comprises 70 percent of all Beacon customers’ claims. Even with that select group, the system now automatically adjudicates 60 percent of those medical-only claims. That takes a large portion of work away from claims workers who can now concentrate on the remaining 40 percent that require personalized attention.

The project of initiating this automatic, Web-based system reportedly took nine months to achieve and is now fully operational. It was completed using existing IT resources available at the company, so there was no need to seek additional infrastructure to make it a reality.

Ward Group called the transformation an “outstanding example” of one company’s ability to automate, modernize, and achieve significant cost savings in one swoop. Beacon’s ability to automate a large portion of its claims stands as a measure of its recent achievements, and its effort to outshine the competition hammers that measure home.