Core systems

Thousand Oaks, Calif. - Blue Cross of California (BCC) introduces an enhanced Dental Blue Cost Estimator, an online tool designed to enable BCC's Dental Blue members to estimate their out-of-pocket expenses for common procedures such as cleanings, fillings and periodontal treatment. Members can access the Dental Blue Cost Estimator, through the recently launched Treatment Cost Advisor tool, to view estimated out-of-pocket costs by zip code.

Los Angeles - Farmers Insurance Group of Companies opened its second ServicePoint operation. The new call center is based in Austin, Texas and is dedicated to providing service and care to Farmers agents and their customers. The other center is in Olathe, Kansas.

Dublin, Ireland - The lack of a structured prioritization model for allocating risk and fraud budget resources is hindering many financial institutions in their fraud mitigation efforts, according to Research and Markets, which has announced the addition of new Javelin Strategy report "Risk & Fraud Budgeting Model: Prioritizing the 2008 Budget for Effective Fraud Mitigation" to their offering.

Washington, D.C. - The Department of Justice and FBI announced the results of an ongoing cyber crime initiative called "Operation Bot Roast," which has identified more than one million victim computer IP addresses.

Washington, D.C. - The federal government is seeking proposals to conduct trial implementations of the national health information network (NHIN).The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the Department of Health and Human Services has published a request for proposals for health data exchanges of various types. The exchanges will cooperate to ensure they can implement an interoperable “network of networks” over the Internet.

New York - The U.S. Government has granted SeaPass Solutions Inc. a broadly worded patent for the SeaPass Gateway Solution for "Interface Development Environment and Interface for Connecting Systems Having Different Data Structures," according to Eric Gewirtzman, CEO of New York-based SeaPass.

Boston - Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) and Atlanta-based health care information technology company MDdatacor Inc. will begin work on a pilot project utilizing health information technology to collect and analyze patient medical records to provide the treating physicians with reports that identify patients whose current treatment does not achieve published clinical guidelines.

Novato, Calif. - Joseph Beneducci tendered his resignation today as chief executive officer at Fireman's Fund Insurance Co., Novato, Calif.

San Francisco - The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) today adopted amendments to the Viatical Settlements Model Act during the Association's Summer National Meeting in San Francisco.

New York - More than three-quarters (77%) of the 100 insurance executives representing the property and casualty and life sectors, along with key market participants who attended Standard & Poor's Ratings Services' 23rd annual insurance conference favored an optional charter for insurance regulation."It is not surprising that the conference participants selected optional federal charter with the emphasis on optional," says Standard & Poor's Insurance Practice Leader Grace Osborne. "The insurance market is becoming increasingly global in scope, and the U.S. insurance industry does not have a single voice to advocate U.S. interests with the foreign regulators and various accounting regimes."

Minneapolis - Unitrin Direct a Chicago supplier of direct-to-consumer automobile insurance and its business partner, State College, Pa.-based Optical Image Technology, Inc., have received the Insurance Accounting and Systems Association's (IASA) 2007 Tech Award, the companies announced. This award was presented during the IASA 2007 Educational Conference and Business Show this week.Ian Zimmerman, Unitrin Direct’s director of underwriting, and OIT’s vice president of sales and marketing, James Thumma, were on hand to accept the award during IASA’s annual business luncheon. Unitrin Direct was looking to support its overall goal of becoming a leading direct auto insurer by scaling processes and optimizing support functions. The joint project between OIT and Unitrin Direct was to implement an enterprise-wide digital organization of their corporate information and to re-engineer their business processes by using workflow to horizontally align disparate silos of information stored within a variety of departments. Unitrin Direct is now equipped to push documents through automated workflows for approvals, signatures, customized letters, and calls as well as implement business processes that will automatically direct actions that need to take place. In addition, multiple technologies and departments such as underwriting, claims, and customer service were connected in order to process more work faster, with fewer human resources. Unitrin implemented Optical Image's DocFinity Workflow product to connect the company's policy administration system, and third-party applications, including their automated call system and capture, indexing, and barcode reading along with other DocFinity components such as an electronic repository. The technology, which includes over 24 separate automated workflows, is expected to continue to enhance Unitrin Direct’s position in a highly competitive insurance market as well as put them in a strong position for future growth, said the companies. Source: Optical Image Technology Inc.

Boston - AIR Worldwide Corp., (AIR) released Version 9.0 of its U.S. Hurricane Model, which includes enhanced methodology for estimating business interruption (BI) losses, which accounts for both building and business characteristics when estimating total BI downtime and includes indirect losses from sources other than physical damage to the insured building. The release also includes enhancements to the model’s demand surge function, the vulnerability of residential contents and pool enclosures, and incorporates research by AIR meteorologists and climate scientists into the link between elevated sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and U.S. landfall activity. “In the aftermath of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, AIR undertook an intensive research and development effort to improve the way catastrophe models estimate business interruption losses,” according to Dr. Jayanta Guin, senior vice president of research and modeling at AIR Worldwide. The software also estimates indirect business interruption losses—those stemming from sources other than physical damage to the insured building—such as utility service interruption, actions taken by civil authorities, dependent building damage, and extended period coverage. The new model has been validated using detailed claims data from 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. Boston-based AIR is also providing an update to Version 9.0 of the U.S. Hurricane Model’s near-term catalog, which incorporates an additional 12 months—and several man-years—of research by AIR meteorologists and climate scientists into the link between elevated SSTs and U.S. landfall activity. Rather than relying on highly uncertain point forecasts of sea-surface temperatures, the Version 9.0 near-term catalog is instead conditioned on the assumption that currently elevated SSTs are likely to remain elevated for the next five years. As a result, the inclusion of one additional hurricane season will not significantly change estimates of near term risk. However, uncertainty in near-term estimates of landfall frequency remain significant, so AIR is once again releasing the near-term catalog as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for the standard catalog, which is based on more than 100 years of historical data. Analysis of claims data from recent hurricane seasons has revealed that contents vulnerability for single-family homes has decreased significantly in recent years. The updated model accounts for this trend. The model has also been enhanced to explicitly account for the impact of hurricane winds on pool enclosures, structures that—according to AIR’s latest research—show a higher vulnerability to wind damage than previously estimated. Finally, the impact of demand surge—the increase in material, services, and labor costs due to increased demand following a catastrophic event—was fine-tuned and validated using high resolution construction cost time series data for the 2004 and 2005 hurricanes taken from XactAnalysis, a reporting tool created by ISO subsidiary Xactware. Research at AIR shows higher levels of demand surge for time element, including BI. A state-of-the-art model alone is not sufficient for generating accurate BI loss estimates, notes the company. AIR’s analyses also revealed significant issues with the accuracy and completeness of insurers’ business interruption exposure data. For many companies, large numbers of locations have very low BI exposure values. In most cases, business interruption limits, which reflect part-year business income exposure, have been set equal to annual BI exposure. AIR also found evidence that companies are using general “rules of thumb” to determine the BI limit, rather than the use of BI worksheets for each location in multi-location policies. Finally, the number of locations that may sustai damage in a catastrophe is often underestimated. Together, these issues regarding the quality of BI exposure data lead to significant underestimation of modeled BI losses by many companies. “Modeled loss estimates are only as accurate as the exposure data input into the catastrophe model,” continued Dr. Guin. “Insurers must continue to put an emphasis on improving the quality and completeness of their BI exposure data to improve the accuracy of the catastrophe risk information used by company management.” Source: AIR Worldwide Corp.

New York - The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America introduced a debit card and Web tools as part of its FlexPlan Flexible Spending Account program, which enables clients to access and manage FSA accounts easily.Guardian's FlexPlan offers employees point of service access to money they set aside in their FSA, minimizing steps of substantiating claims with receipts and waiting for FSA reimbursements via mail. Clients can pay for co-payments, deductibles, prescriptions, eyeglasses and other eligible healthcare expenses with just one swipe of a Benny Pre-paid MasterCard card.

Chicago - Insurance Networking News magazine, a SourceMedia publication, released the results of its 2007 INNovators Award, a special designation intended to advance the spread of business technology acumen in the insurance industry.Nominees for the 2007 INNovators program included insurance carriers, agencies and brokerages. Their "innovation" was required to have been in production long enough to have returned demonstrable, tangible results.

U.S. CONSUMERS WANT CONTROL OF E-HEALTH RECORDSAmericans show a strong interest in controlling their own electronic medical records, according to a national survey released at a health IT conference.

ARCOT SYSTEMS AND ADOBE WORK ON DIGITAL SIGNINGSunnyvale, Calif.-based Arcot Systems Inc. has collaborated with San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. to create a new option for digital signing in Adobe Acrobat software and Adobe Reader software using "Roaming Digital IDs."

PURE CHOOSES ONESHIELD FOR POLICY ADMIN SYSTEMPrivilege Underwriters Reciprocal Exchange (PURE), a startup with headquarters in Plantation, Fla., has selected software from Westborough, Mass.-based OneShield Inc. to support administration of new insurance products. PURE deployed OneShield's Dragon platform to manage the end-to-end policy administration of PURE High Net Worth Insurance personal lines product offerings.

Ithaca, N.Y. - Contrary to what many people think, the large majority of call centers serving United States' customers – service centers in remote locations that handle telephone and web-based inquiries – are operated in the U.S., not in India and other overseas locations. This is one of the findings revealed in "The Global Call Center Report: International Perspectives on Management and Employment."Some of the study's key findings:

New York - In an effort to involve its members in government affairs and lobbying initiatives, the New York-based Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. (RIMS) launched the RIMS Legislative Action Center on its Web site at www.RIMS.org/LegislativeAction."RIMS has made it easy for risk professionals to become more active in government affairs," says Terry Fleming, member of RIMS Board of Directors and director of the division of risk management for Montgomery County, Md. "RIMS is recognized in government as the voice of risk management, but we need members to become more supportive. RIMS Legislative Action Center will provide the risk management industry with the tools necessary to reach out to members of Congress and make their voice heard."

Washington - Life insurance costs could be reduced by billions of dollars annually under an optional federal chartering system, according to a new study, comprised of research from Steven Pottier, associate professor of insurance at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business.