Health Insurance Innovations Brings Compliance Reporting to Glowing Health and Pockets Time Savings

HIIQ connects top-rated insurance carriers with independent insurance agents and brokers via its cloud-based quoting and enrolling application. To meet compliance requirements, HIIQ must ensure that people fully understand the coverage they are purchasing at the point of sale. To achieve this goal, the company asks sales agents to read through product verification scripts with customers, outlining the details of their coverage. For example, if a customer is purchasing an insurance policy that is not covered by the Affordable Care Act, then the salesperson is required to bring this point to their attention.

 

Dan Garavuso, Vice President of Compliance at HIIQ, explained, “We provide a huge range of insurance policies catering to customers’ full range of healthcare needs – from dental care and vision through to emergency treatment. We maintain a verification script for each product, so in total we manage nearly 50 scripts, each around thirty pages long.

 

“Here comes the challenge: What do you do when things change and you need to update the scripts? If an insurer alters their terms and conditions, you might have a handful of documents to update. But if state or federal regulations change, we need to verify that each product script is compliant and accurate, and ensure that the language is consistent across all affected policies.”

 

In the past, HIIQ employed updated product documentation manually. Maintaining consistency was extremely difficult, and the process was slow – for example, it could take up to two days to update documents after a change in regulations. HIIQ cannot risk providing outdated information to consumers, so during update periods, the company must instruct sales agents not to sell affected insurance policies – impacting revenues. 

 

To manage version control, HIIQ maintained spreadsheets tracking script iterations. Also, it was difficult to ensure that each sales agent had access to the latest scripts for the products they promote.

 

Christine Gillis, Agency Compliance Manager at HIIQ, elaborated, “HIIQ has grown massively in the last few years, and we recognized that our existing manual ways of working could no longer keep pace with our business. To stay ahead of the competition, we needed to be able to provide accurate information to sales agents and consumers much faster. We set out to find a better, more efficient way of working.”

 

To cure its document-management pains, HIIQ decided to deploy the Kofax Customer Communications Manager™ solution, which helps the company ensure consistency across verification scripts. The solution serves as a single source of the truth for HIIQ employees and sales agents, ensuring that everyone has complete, correct and up-to-date information on insurance policies. In addition, the software maintains a track record of document edits, including the author and timestamp for each change.

 

The Kofax platform earned a warm welcome among employees, as Dominique Meitzen, Lead Verification Specialist at HIIQ, remarked, “The Kofax Customer Communications Manager solution is extremely user-friendly, so it is very quick and easy to learn. In fact, even when building out the first few scripts on the Kofax solution, pretty much everything turned out right the first time.

 

“Maintaining consistency across scripts is so much easier than before. Previously, I had to open numerous Microsoft Word documents and PDFs to ensure that the same language was used throughout – now, I can search our entire script collection at the touch of a button. And if I need to modify a certain block of text, I can make the update once and automatically apply the change to all scripts. The solution is a huge time-saver, enabling me to work more productively.”

 

HIIQ has integrated Kofax Customer Communications Manager with its Adobe Sign solution, which manages electronic signatures of sales contracts. Also, if customers agree verbally to terms and conditions, HIIQ stores a voice recording of the conversation for compliance purposes in Kofax Customer Communications Manager.

 

HIIQ is already enjoying the benefits of Kofax technology, as Christine Gillis explained, “Updates that used to take hours or days are now completed in minutes, and our error rate has dropped. As a result, we can deliver accurate, up-to-date documentation to sales agents much more quickly, and ensure that frequent regulatory changes do not disrupt our sales cycle.”

 

Dan Garavuso continued, “Our investment in Kofax is paying off in other areas, too. For example, independent sales agents are very happy to work with us, because they know that we equip them with accurate product information, so they don’t have problems down the line. 

 

“Also, insurers are eager to partner with us, because they are confident that we correctly represent their products in the market – which is important, because they underwrite the policies. Insurers know that if they change the terms of their policies, we’ll be able to alter the documentation, agree on a new version with them, then distribute the latest copy much faster than before. Previously, back-and-forth processes like this took a couple of days, whereas now we can often finalize changes on the same day. It’s a great way for us to strengthen relationships with our partner insurers.”

 

The Kofax solution dramatically simplifies compliance. Auditors often ask to see all scripts modified within a certain timeframe, including which changes were made and who approved the edits. Previously, HIIQ employees worked overtime to identify and pull together the relevant documentation – whereas now, the company can simply, generate and present a report from Kofax Customer Communications Manager.

 

In the future, HIIQ plans to create scripts tailored to specific sales agents or client presentations, helping to target its messaging to boost the chances of closing a deal. Additionally, HIIQ intends to leverage the Kofax solution to manage other document types, such as the correspondence relating to onboarding new customers, automated marketing communications, policy renewals, and communication with sales agents.

 

Travis Conley, Chief Technology Officer at HIIQ, concluded, “Today’s consumers have a great deal of choice in health insurance. This makes it vital for us to have technologies in place that give our distributor partners the leverage they need to encourage their clients to buy from them rather than rival insurance agents. With Kofax, we can deliver better customer service and motivate more sales agents and insurers to partner with us, helping to grow our market share and stay.