Insurance Policy Management Software: What Is It And How Does It Help Insurance Companies?
A solid and comprehensive set of policies and procedures serves as the foundation for any business and is essential to its success. Policies and procedures work together to guide your company and reduce liability risks. They establish internal and external expectations and promote consistency throughout your organization for both employees and customers.
What exactly is the issue? It can be difficult to keep your policies up to date with constantly changing laws, regulations, and compliance best practices. If you do not do so, you will fail to keep your employees informed of and follow the most recent information, which will have the opposite effect of what your policies were intended to achieve.
When employees carry out their responsibilities based on outdated information, your company risks noncompliance, which can lead to lawsuits, fines, penalties, scandals, injuries, and other consequences.
What is policy management software?
Policy management software is a tool that allows users to organize and manage all of their policy and procedure documents in a central location.
This insurance software enables legal and other teams to collaborate on the creation, editing, and maintenance of policy and procedure documents. Employees can also digitally certify that they have read and comprehended the policies.
Access controls and administrator privileges are also included in policy management tools to prevent unauthorized users from editing, reviewing, or approving policies.
For your business, what benefits does policy management software offer?
If you want to replace your disorganized or burdensome policy management system with a powerful, modern tech solution, it would be beneficial to understand how policy management software would benefit your business. Simply put, it can save you and your company time, effort, and money.
Some of the main strengths of the policy management system are as follows:
Improve policy communication
If employees never hear about policies until there is a problem, you are not effectively communicating the value and importance of these documents. When a policy is changed or it is time for an annual review, policy management software can send an automated notification.
When an important company compliance event occurs, the software will notify employees automatically (such as an audit or accreditation review). All of this automation ensures that employees are always up to date without you having to remember to notify everyone.
Employees value and value policies more when communication is improved.
They understand how policies affect their jobs, why these policies are important, and what has changed since previous versions. All of this contributes to greater organizational compliance.
Simple policy collaboration
Policies are usually reviewed by several people before they are implemented. To develop and modify policies and procedures, subject matter experts, department heads, executives, general counsel, and others must work together.
Using email or even online word processors can make this collaborative process more difficult. It’s not always clear who made which changes, what concerns others have, and when and who signed off on which changes. There are simply too many moving parts in policy creation (and modification) to rely on such an ad hoc approach.
This method, as expected, adds unnecessary delays to the process and increases the likelihood that a few steps will be overlooked or completely forgotten.
Policy management systems enable the automation of the review and approval processes through repeatable, consistent workflows.
You can not only track all changes, but you can also leave comments, receive notifications when something requires your approval, and receive accurate approval confirmation before proceeding to the next step. Best of all, these steps can be repeated indefinitely, ensuring that the changes have been reviewed and approved by the appropriate people before they go live.
Document control and security
Every employee does not have to be aware of all policies. Not every employee is legally permitted to view every company policy or document in some highly regulated industries.
You wouldn’t give a lower-level employee access to upper-management documents that they could change or delete, for example. Document-level security is difficult to achieve with the majority of shared drives or cloud-hosting services.
Policy management software solutions include document control and security. Not only can you control who has access to each document, but you can also control their level of access, such as viewing, editing, approving, or even removing the document from the system.
Policy management software is intended to reduce your risk. To do so, you’ll need strong security options that you can control and rely on to ensure that only the right employees have access to the right information at the right time.
Tracking compliance
An important aspect of risk management is the ability to track who has seen and signed a policy.
Too often, businesses rely on ineffective manual methods such as paper sign-off sheets, spreadsheets, or even email-read receipts to hold employees accountable.
With a policy management solution, you can easily track each step of this process. When employees were informed of a policy or change, when they opened the document, and when they electronically signed it, you’ll know.
This ensures that you did everything possible to inform the employee about the policy. You can also show that employees were aware of the company’s expectations.
If and when a policy violation occurs in the future, using policy management software reduces your liability.
Strong version controls
In some cases, you must prove not only that an employee signed a policy, but also it is exact wording at the time they signed it.
If you work in an industry where information is constantly changing, this can be difficult to demonstrate. This is not the case, however, with policy management software. To prove the wording on that specific date, you can use the robust version control to retrieve the exact version that an employee signed.
This facilitates compliance tracking. It’s also worth noting that policy management software only provides employees with the most recent version. Hidden folders and other workarounds are no longer required.
Previous revisions, on the other hand, are saved within the policy management software but are not accessible to the public until you need them.
Conclusion
Policy management is a critical insurance process that should be approached with extreme caution. The best insurance policy software is one that is supported by recent developments in process automation. It ensures that the entire policy management process, from policy issuance to required analysis, runs smoothly. Automation offers numerous advantages, including improved operational efficiency, significant cost and time savings, advanced analytics, and increased productivity.
At Amity Software, we use cutting-edge technology and software to increase productivity. With the help of dependable insurance policy management software, insurance companies can streamline their operations and pave the way for success. Our policy management tool simplifies claim processing, the underwriting process, and fraud prevention.
