Canada Life is pleased to announce that from the start of April it will be accepting electronic employer claims forms for both its group income protection and group critical illness contracts.
Currently, employers or their advisers complete claims forms manually and send in via the postal system. However, the new electronic system will save employers a significant amount of time and effort, as removing the need to send hard copies can get the claims process started up to 6 days sooner. This could have saved up to around 10,000 days for employers making claims with Canada Life in 2012 alone.
The legislative requirement for signatures on areas such as medical consent and data protection etc. means that employee claim forms will still need to be completed in hard copy.
Mike Newcombe, Director of Claims Management Services, comments: “We aim to make the claims process as simple and easy as possible for both employers and employees. In 2012, we saw our response times on the receipt of a claim form improve once again and we are now looking to see if there is anything else we can do to reduce the amount of time it takes to pay a claim.
“We believe that we are already doing all we can to improve the efficiency of our administration process and even saving just a few days in the post will benefit everyone involved.”
Paul Avis, Marketing Director, comments: “Having had confirmation from our legal team of the ability to accept a soft copy claim form without a hard copy signature, it seemed simple to us to offer an electronic claim form. We view ourselves as the technology leader in group insurance and so will continue to evolve our e-commerce initiatives to benefit advisers, employers and employees.
We understand we already have some of the best cycle times for post-claims form receipt decision making and so we have had to look beyond that stage of the process to further augment our aim to make continuous service improvements.”
