by John Paudel, Senior Software Architect
The risk industry is changing. Capturing more data points and providing more analytics for those points has become more important than ever before. If you work in any aspect of risk management within your organization, you recognize the enormous amount of information you need to process and track. It might be for insurance renewals, policy underwriting, managing claims, or controlling losses. It might be for property insurance management or worker’s compensation claims. It might be to meet government compliance requirements and regulations.
No matter the purpose, all of this data for each of those processes needs to be collected somewhere. Often, it’s in spreadsheets, but sometimes it’s in siloed databases. In both cases, this means you generally can only see a fraction of the information you need at a time. Information may not be shared between systems and may not be easily shared between individuals who are working on different phases of the same risk management process. If it’s kept in spreadsheets, you run the risk of added version control issues. If it’s kept in siloed systems, it’s difficult to get the overarching information you need to make better decisions. Either way, it can be frustrating, inefficient and prone to error.
This is where a configurable RMIS solution can be important to your organization. RMIS stands for “risk management information system,” and this centralized system consolidates all risk-related data into one place to manage activities such as underwriting, insurance renewal, claims management, and loss control.
A configurable RMIS puts you in the “driver’s seat” by offering added vision into — and control over — all of the risk management processes important to your specific organization, helping you see where you are, and where you need to go. It helps you move processes forward and see what phase you’re in, within all of them.
What processes can you streamline with a configurable RMIS system?
To put it simply, the answer is: whichever risk management modules are important to your organization. When we developed Centurisk’s own risk management information system — eRIMS — we gathered requirements from existing customers, as well as other best practices across the RMIS industry. This was the starting point to build the modules that risk management organizations need most. The result is a highly-configurable solution where each module can be turned on and off easily to meet the client’s specific business needs.
Because the solution is modular, this makes integration faster and minimizes the deployment for any add-on and future feature enhancements. Since the system is developed to meet a wide range of customers’ requirements, this makes the product both standardized and more affordable.
A configurable solution like Centurisk’s eRIMS can assist in gathering property-related COPE data, auto data, and employee data related to underwriting insurance policies and managing different types of claims. It can streamline the incident and claim intake process electronically, as every field in the system can be audited, making every element highly visible and trackable.
But the system also can integrate modules to track and process Certificates of Insurance (COI). It can create inspection and visitation logs. It can help perform safety training. And it can assist with customer relationship management (CRM). If you choose the Investigation module, you can access important features such as Root Cause Analysis and Correct Action capabilities, to minimize the impact of claims. You can choose to integrate Loss Control Questionnaires and Evaluations functionality that provide actuarial data and loss control history information to underwriters, helping them more easily determine final premiums.
For all of these modules, a configurable risk management information system not only integrates analytical tools like drill-down graphs to analyze different data sets, but it also has automatic report scheduling and delivery functionalities. This lets you see into your system and analyze real-time data in ways you can’t with spreadsheets and siloed database systems, and share this information with others.
Additional benefits of a configurable risk management information system
Beyond the capabilities of the different modules that support an organization’s risk management processes, a configurable RMIS system like Centurisk’s eRIMS can help streamline and improve:
- Regulatory compliance — A configurable solution should be designed to help your organization meet industry compliance requirements for HIPAA, OSHA Log and EDI. And it should make submitting compliance information easier by filing all related documents electronically. This, in turn, creates an electronic history of submissions, so you can track which documents were submitted and when.
- Data capture through templates — A RMIS system shares certain data elements like contact information on a policy level, claim level, and customer level across multiple modules, as well as for third-party administrator (TPA) and vendor operations. Because of this interconnectivity, you can easily build templates to capture new data elements across the system. The system is flexible enough to add those templates to any module in the application, capturing data and providing reporting and analytics on those data sets.
- Security permissions — With a highly-configured system, a RMIS admin has total control of security access for all users, which is particularly important to protect the sensitive data the system can house. A RMIS solution is used by many different departments including Underwriting, Claims, Finance, and Actuary, so this allows you to set different security access levels for individuals in each department and specialized role across the system based on their needs.
- Sharing data — Exchanging data between third-party administrators, vendors and customers can be challenging when you’re using spreadsheets and sharing documents. Version control can be a continual problem and it’s easy to lose track what document held the most recent information. A configured system should have easy data export and import capabilities which make it easy to download and upload the latest data, ensuring everyone is always aligned with the right, most current information.
- High-level knowledge — The configurable application dashboard that a system like Centurisk’s eRIMS provides is another way users can get the information they need from their risk management system quickly and easily. These features let you select the information you want to see, and how you want to see it. So upper management can have key information in a single page, whereas other users can customize their own dashboard page to streamline their daily tasks more effectively.
- The ability to update business processes quickly — As business grows, business processes change, so a robust RMIS should have a configurable business rule module that can be adjusted by end users whenever needs shift over time.
A configurable RMIS is the key to better decision making
With the connectivity, flexibility and drill-down analytical capabilities of a configurable risk management information system, you can not only gather and share the important information you need to make better strategic decisions and meet compliance requirements. But your organization can assemble the system that meets your needs now and then easily add enhancements and critical features as new needs arise.
(For more information on Centurisk’s eRIMS Risk Management Information System, click here.)
About the author
John Paudel is a Senior Software Architect at Centurisk.