Claims

Encinitas, Calif.-based Work Loss Data Institute (WLDI) released its 2012 State Report Cards for Workers’ Comp this week. The report, which is used to track trends and give states a grade and tier ranking based on their performance, now includes data from a 10-year period. Forty-three states are covered, plus Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands.

Recent calculations from ISO and PCI indicate insurers faced extreme headwinds in their core business—underwriting.

With the stroke of a pen on Saturday, President Obama signed a continuing resolution that bought the troubled National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) another week of funding.

Farmers Insurance was recognized for its claims handling system, which is driven by Pega technology from Pegasystems Inc., a Business Process Management (BPM) and customer centricity software company. The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) awarded Farmers a Silver Award as part of its 18th Annual Global Awards for Excellence in Business Process Management and Workflow.

GlobalOptions will serve as the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) provider to Argo Group US Inc., an international underwriter of specialty insurance and reinsurance products to P&C markets, and its subsidiaries.

JEVCO Insurance Co., a specialty insurer, is in production with ClaimCenter, the claims management solution from Guidewire Software, a provider of core system software to P&C insurers.

Keeping property repair rates down requires not only proper initial assessment, but occasional re-evaluations from an underwriting perspective as well.

Emergency Physicians Insurance Company RRG (EPIC) and Echo Ridge Partners have implemented iCatalyst, a policy and claims management system designed to streamline processes and improve customer service throughout an entire policy lifecycle.

From a catastrophe-loss standpoint, 2011 is more likely to be remembered for the variety and frequency of loss events rather than a singular catastrophe.

FINEOS Corp., a provider of claims management software, is including the IBM Insurance Framework in its product. FINEOS says insurance solutions offered by IBM are built on the IBM Framework and aim to create more flexible, responsive insurance companies through the progressive transformation of operational processes. FINEOS, a partner of IBM, offers FINEOS Claims, a solution to manage claims for life and disability, P&C, London market and government insurance.

While the insurance industry was an early adopter of mobile technology for basic communication functions, it has lagged in developing and implementing internal and customer-facing applications.

Warm weather offers favorable conditions for car thieves, while holidays and cold weather bode well for potential victims, according to a new report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

Insurers in Britain may have a new data set to consider in their predictive analytics endeavors: the increase in claims due to personal lines property/casualty policyholders’ “do-it-yourself” (DIY) home improvements.

Last decade, car crashes were the leading cause of teen deaths, with 16-year-old drivers possessing crash rates two times greater than 18-to-19-year-old drivers and four times that of older drivers. But Allstate and the National Safety Council think they know how to cut into the 81,000 fatalities resulting from crashes involving teen drivers between 2000 and 2009, claiming in a new report that nationwide GDL laws have the potential to prevent over 2,000 such deaths and save $13.6 billion annually.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has issued a final rule to make available standardized extracts of Medicare claims data to facilitate measuring the performance of providers and suppliers. The rule has significant changes that enable use of clinical data along with the claims data.

A.M. Best's recent catastrophe-related loss estimates reveal a bad first nine months of 2011 for U.S. P&C insurers. According to the agency's briefing “U.S. Property/Casualty Catastrophe Losses Climb to $38.6 Billion for the First Nine Months of 2011,” the estimated total net pretax accident-year catastrophe-related losses were $38.6 billion, up $22.5 billion (140 percent), from an estimated $16.1 billion reported during the same period a year ago.

Fraud is on the rise in the United States and globally, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2011 Global Economic Crime Survey, with cyber crime making the most significant increase in the two years since the firm’s last survey.

A comparison of third-quarter data from 2009, 2010 and 2011 reveals a notable increase in the number of questionable claims submitted, according to a new report issued by the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Des Plaines, Ill. In its third-quarter 2011 questionable claims (QC) referral reason analysis, the Bureau examined six referral reason categories of claims—property, casualty, commercial, workers' compensation, vehicle and miscellaneous—for the quarters listed above.

The introduction of telematic technologies will help improve overall road safety, new data from U.K.-based The Co-operative Insurance shows.

The retail theft claims insurers expect to pay out this holiday weekend may take a back seat to those presented by clients with commercial package policies that include business interruption. CNBC reports that demonstrators are taking the Occupy Wall Street movement to retailers with an organized effort called “Stop Black Friday.”