Be careful what you wish for. In 2002, when Pan-American Life Insurance Company introduced Worksite, a line of supplementary health, life and disability insurance for workers, the New Orleans-based mutual company expected they had a few years to keep records on paper and process claims by hand. In a pleasant surprise with a few less-than-pleasant implications, Worksite's sales far exceeded projections. As a result, in only two years, the volume of claims grew to 7,000 per week, and claims processors struggled to keep up.

Pan-American administrators huddled with Chief Technology Officer Karen Chauvin, authorizing electronic automation of the paper-based processes. Intense pressure prompted Chauvin and her staff to quickly find an economical, permanent solution to the paper glut.

In 2002, Pan-American's life insurance line had converted from microfiche storage to digital images. The input system was Kofax Ascent Capture, and the software licensing (images per month) had adequate capacity to add the Worksite documents. AIS upgraded the system with the newest Kofax products: Ascent Capture 6.1, Adrenaline 650i scanner controller cards and VirtualReScan (VRS) automated image enhancement. Simultaneously, the consultants - drawing on Pan-American's existing business process reengineering - began the health insurance configuration. A key component was Kofax's Neurascript INDICIUS™ forms processing module.

Now INDICIUS™ reads the forms, extracting information and populating Pan-American's backend database. If a form is unreadable by the machine, it goes to a human quality controller for manual entry. Once the data enters the line-of-business computer, an IBM midrange, the system approves routine claims automatically before cutting and mailing checks without human intervention. Questionable claims go to a human evaluator who looks at the data form and/or the related scanned image.