Delta Dental of Colorado has gone digital, moving from paper-driven processes to electronic content and workflows, using Kofax solutions to manage and track documents throughout their entire lifecycle. Today, the company has shortened turnaround times for key processes from weeks to days, and can deliver a more responsive service to providers and customers—all while facilitating regulatory compliance.
The Challenge
Today’s consumers demand faster, more efficient services, insurers must race to keep up. Companies that fail to meet ever-increasing expectations risk damaging customer satisfaction and losing valuable business to more agile competitors.
These are challenges that Delta Dental of Colorado knows well. With teams inundated with large volumes of paper files, tracking the progress of individual documents was a difficult task. The result? Delays that drove up operating costs and threatened to damage the company’s relationship with providers and customers.
Heather Magic, Director of Group and Individual Administration at Delta Dental of Colorado, explains:
“Every day, we exchange a huge amount of information with our dental providers and customers, concerning applications, renewals, policy updates, and more. In the past, it was difficult for teams to access and process this documentation efficiently. A lack of visibility and control over content meant that files often got lost in the shuffle, and could take days or even weeks to be processed.
“Additionally, as an insurer, we are required to retain certain documents for up to 10 years—and be able to retrieve them at a moment’s notice in the event of an audit. Relying on paper made it difficult to respond to audit requests in a timely manner. In some cases, we were unable to locate specific documents, which exposed us to the risk of costly penalties.”
Delta Dental of Colorado recognized that there was an urgent need to adopt a more strategic approach to managing enterprise content. With a better view of information and a deeper understanding of the status of individual documents, teams would be able to handle a higher volume of work more efficiently and deliver a more responsive service to providers and customers—all while ensuring regulatory compliance.
The Solution
Delta Dental of Colorado has embarked on an ambitious effort to replace paper-driven processes with electronic content and workflows. The company is taking control of the end-to-end document lifecycle, using Kofax solutions to capture and manage content from the moment it is received, and seamlessly integrate it with existing business processes.
Heather Magic comments:
“Today, content management begins and ends with Kofax solutions. For example, when a new dental provider applies to join our network, we can automatically classify and extract the information we need from their application form and supporting documentation, and feed the necessary digital content into our business applications and workflows.”
Additionally, Delta Dental of Colorado takes advantage of Kofax Insight™ to link data and metrics to steps in business processes, gaining timely, accurate insight into operations. The company obtains a deeper understanding of how processes are working, helping it to remove bottlenecks and improve efficiency.
Heather Magic says:
“For the first time, we can track data and processes across the entire document lifecycle, and have access to a host of dashboards and metrics. This allows us to pinpoint where a particular work item is at any given time, which user has been working on it, and for how long.
“With Kofax solutions, we can make informed, data-driven decisions about how we manage our processes and people. The result is that people are more accountable for the work they are doing, and can achieve more in shorter turnaround times.”
Strong partnership delivers real results
From the very start, Delta Dental worked with business partner Tromba Technologies to ensure that the Kofax solutions were expertly configured and deployed.
Heather Magic remarks:
“We have a great working relationship with Tromba—they are the reason why this project has been so successful. The entire team has been fantastic at working with us to understand our business and tailor the Kofax solutions to meet our unique needs.”
Delta Dental of Colorado kicked off its Kofax implementation in 2013, and has been working consistently to extend the solutions to cover more processes and functional areas.
Heather Magic states:
“Working with Tromba, we have hit almost every single deadline we have set for ourselves. For 2015, we set a goal of completing six new projects—which our executive team felt was almost impossible—and are on track to have everything implemented before year-end.”
With the Kofax solutions, Delta Dental of Colorado has been able to reap a rapid return on its investment, as Heather Magic explains:
“At the outset, we estimated that it would take between four and six months before we achieved a return on investment (ROI) for individual projects. In reality, we have been seeing a ROI as early as one to two months for certain projects. And taking the entire Kofax implementation into account, we have achieved a ROI within six months, which is phenomenal.”
The Results
Today, Delta Dental of Colorado is empowering teams with newfound control over information and processes, helping them manage growing volumes of work more effectively.
Heather Magic gives an example:
“When new providers apply to join our network we have to carry out a rigorous series of checks to verify that they have the proper credentials and that the information provided in their application is accurate. Each application can span up to 26 pages, and contain more than three dozen fields.
“What’s more, we are required to regularly re-validate dentists’ credentials. We used to do this every five years, but recent regulations have changed this to every three years. This caused a huge spike in workload, and staff were finding it difficult to keep up.
“Previously, a team of two people—and a temporary staff member—spent hours checking each application or renewal manually. They would have to pull data from the application and go out to a number of different websites to verify that the information provided was up-to-date and accurate.”
She continues:
“Today, we’ve streamlined the data-gathering and verification process with Kofax Kapow. All the necessary information is automatically captured from the web and put into the relevant workflows for our operators to review and approve. This has massively reduced workload for the team, so two people can now process all of the work items without the need for help from a temporary worker. Not only has this delivered considerable cost savings, it helps us to ensure that provider applications and renewals are processed in a timely manner, keeping our partners satisfied.”
Reducing risk, boosting responsiveness
Introducing a centralized electronic document repository and flexible case management capabilities has enabled faster, more reliable access to information. Heather Magic states: “Teams can access information online in seconds, which helps them deliver a much more responsive service to customers and providers. Improved document traceability also means that Delta Dental of Colorado can respond to audit requests in a more timely, consistent manner—reducing business risk.”
Greater levels of agility and insight are helping Delta Dental of Colorado to lift its customer services to new heights, driving continued growth of its provider network and customer base.
Heather Magic concludes:
“Kofax solutions have made Delta Dental of Colorado much more agile. They are really helping us to blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to turnaround times in particular. Whereas in the past, it could take weeks to respond to applications and other requests, we can now get back to customers and providers in just a few days.
“We have been incredibly impressed with the Kofax solutions—they have transformed the way we work. For the first time, we can say that we have total control and visibility of content as it moves through our business, and the ability to work with information in a much more accurate and efficient way. We are excited to continue working with Tromba to explore new ways to use the Kofax solutions to help our teams work more productively and deliver an even higher level of service.”
