Projects

Business Situation

This company is an USA based Life Expectancy Reports (LER) provider for the Life Settlement Industry. As a part of their service offering, they need to process thousands of medical record pages every day in order to evaluate the life expectancy of the people who want to get their life insurance policies settled by settlement providers.

Before contacting us for a software-based solution they typically had to handle papers manually, sort them into chronological order, extract medically relevant information from each page, prepare a medical summary of the case and finally using a proprietary life table, fix the expected duration of remaining life for the applicant.

Challenges

The above manual way of handling led to several problems for the company that were proving to be significant deterrents to their growth. The problems can be enumerated as follows:

They had to rent a huge warehouse at significant cost to store all the medical records.

The papers needed to come to them physically through post, which again meant a huge cost in postage and courier charges.

The manual process of chronological sorting of physical papers was extremely slow and inherently error prone, leading to frequent embarrassments.

Frequently they received the same file twice from different providers and then it would be profitable to retrieve the previous sorted file for the same case to reduce the workload significantly. But physical storage meant a very inefficient search-retrieval process which also meant additional costs as the warehouse charged extra for these services.

Finally, they could not attract and retain suitable staff to do this mundane chronological sorting of paper documents.

Solutions

We needed to solve two basic problems here to provide them a lasting solution: We needed to figure out a way to convert the papers to electronic documents and provide a software interface to do the chronological sorting. This would make storage cheap and will provide an efficient way to do the sorting.

We needed to find a way to solve their problem of staff attrition.

We solved the first problem by writing a server based, distributed software that would automatically upload scanned pages straight from the scanners to a server. Then we wrote a browser-based program to do the chronological sorting through an intuitive and easy user interface. Next, we provided them with a team of Business Processing Executives in Kolkata, India who would check the scanned images against the data files created from them, then sort the records appropriately. Finally, we put together an IT infrastructure consisting of scanners, servers and software’s for secure transmission of files, at the Client offices in USA also in our Kolkata office. The transmission of files would happen through the Internet using data encryption for security and privacy of data.

This solution was put in place by end of February 2005 and actual work started in April 2005. From then on approximately 20,000 pages get scanned every day at the Client offices using high speed scanners and are transferred securely through the internet to our office servers in Kolkata. Our processing executives do the chronological sorting during our daytime and the results are transmitted back to the Client servers before their extractors and underwriters start working the next day based upon our electronically sorted files. Once the above engagement started and their confidence in our services grew, they wanted us to take up more jobs for them.

They wanted to build a paper-less office and wanted us to put an electronic work flow in place for the whole range of their back-office work. This included extraction of medically relevant information from the sorted files, creating medical case abstracts, underwriting and then raising invoices and managing collection. For this they contracted three programmers from our IT department on a monthly retainer to create and maintain these programs on an ongoing basis.

They also started a secondary service of 'redacting' (in other words blocking out to make it impossible to read select words or phrases – e.g. identifying character strings like, name, address, dates, social security numbers etc. – within the documents), within medical records for insurance companies involved in litigation. For this too we created the electronic work flow and now this service is a significant residual revenue earner for both Client and MGTS.

About 8 months back, after long deliberations, they also agreed to outsource the extraction part of the work flow to us. Preliminary training of Indian doctors ended by February 2008 and the process went into commercial production by March, 2008. Currently 12 doctors and 15 KPO executives participate in this highly knowledge intensive work-flow and they currently process 3,000 pages of patient medical records per day. A team of 3 dedicated system engineers and programmers maintain the system and provide IT support both to the end client as well as our in-house KPO team.