Submitting insurance claims is one activity I would gladly delegate to AI and automation. The transition from paper forms and snail mail to online data entry definitely improved the process. However, the transformation wasn’t enough to create a real high-quality digital experience.
With paper forms I felt annoyed filling in all the information. Then I had to assemble them with the receipts and mail it. I had to make my own scans or photocopies to retain in case something happened to the claim. The whole thing took a long time, both to prepare and to wait for the result. Usually I received a check in the mail which took even more time to go and deposit.
While some of the wait times are dramatically improved with the online process, some of it remains frustratingly outdated. I appreciate that the processing time is now days with direct deposit into my bank account. However, I still submit the claims by filling out a clunky online form. A couple years ago my company switched insurers and the online forms became even worse. Here are a few examples.
One question on the form asks if your partner has insurance. Even though my partner had insurance with the same insurer, every time I selected yes I had to fill out his plan, policy number, and birthdate. Every. Single. Time. As though these things would change frequently. Also, the insurer inconsistently submitted the remainder of my claims to my partner’s insurance policy. We discovered this months later and it was annoying to fix.
Earlier this week I had to submit a dental claim. Fortunately my regular dentist submits the claims for me, but this was for a new dentist that wasn’t able to do that. For a dental claim, I had to enter in each line item as a separate procedure code. Even though six codes were from the same visit, I had to re-enter the date and some other repetitive information every time. The whole time I kept wondering why I couldn’t just upload the receipt and have the system automatically fill out the claim. This would be much easier and likely more accurate as many of the codes were similar and ripe for typos. Just one example of how a technological improvement didn’t go far enough to transform the clunky parts of a process.
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