Wising Up on InsurAI-nce
When people think of the insurance industry, seldom do they feel excitement, despite its expansive impact on everyday life. While the modern American insurance industry dates back to the early 1700s, the concept has been around for over 4000 years. In that time the premise has not changed much: execute policies, collect premiums, and process claims. While new products such as cyber or wildfire insurance have been developed, the industry has been due for a shake-up in how these products are delivered.
Nowhere is that shakeup more urgently needed than in the medical industry. Sensitive and complex medical documentation, where full medical records can range anywhere from 100 to 5000+ pages, are usually submitted as a disorganized non-chronological single PDF or digital packet. They contain a variety of documents from a claimant’s full medical history, including medical charts, handwritten doctor’s notes, and prescriptions, and often contain pages of duplicate information. Organizing and summarizing these records is no trivial task and generally takes between 4 and 12 hours depending on file sizes and case complexity. When health coverage and care is on the line, this continuous documentation delay can be incredibly costly.
Enter Wisedocs
Wisedocs’ Founder and CEO Connor Atchison discovered how friction-laden and time-consuming this process was firsthand during his time with the Canadian Armed Forces where he spent years in infantry and seven years in health care administration. Witnessing how friends and coworkers had trouble managing disability claims and the abhorrent wait times once claims were submitted, he was determined to make the process more efficient.
Atchison started Wisedocs in 2018 as a response to this problem. Originally a platform focused on giving veterans safe digital storage of their medical records, the company has quickly expanded their scope in response to the huge gap in the market. In 2020, after recognizing the massive technological shift towards AI and automation across the insurance industry, Wisedocs introduced intelligent processing via proprietary machine learning models to eventually become the industry segment’s premier document intelligence tool. This had brought them to where they are now – working directly within the claims process rather than consumers.
The rapid adoption of new technologies across carriers of all sizes has created genuine excitement for the future of the megalithic seven trillion dollar industry. The integration of advanced technologies in insurance has paved the way for further evolution, offering improved efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced customer experience. For those handling medical records during their claims process, Wisedocs paves the path to significant advancements in automation, accuracy, and fraud detection.
Wisedocs’ flagship product saves valuable time and billable hours for those handling medical records in the medical claims process by automatically consolidating and organizing lengthy and complex medical records and allows files to be securely shared across major stakeholders during a medical review. The handling of these records is a vital and manually laborious part of the claim processing chain as the record acts as the main data source for a decision on acceptance or denial.
Medical documentation and claims processing is an under-innovated corner of the vast insurance technology space. Insurance claims adjusters and third party administrators are a $247B market in the US alone. The field of medical claims processing, including insurance companies and IMEs, is a $5B industry growing at a 4% CAGR annually. By introducing a valuable point solution into this complicated industry, Wisedocs has the opportunity to expand its services further, engraining itself into the multi-stakeholder value chain and providing benefits to everyone involved from carriers to doctors and lawyers and, of course, to claimants.
Looking Forward for the Insurance Industry
As the company continues to expand its offerings and deliver high quality intelligent document processing and automation in the medical claims space, Atchison and co-founder Jenna Earnshaw remain laser focused on their goal of changing the way medical records are handled during the claims process. Complementing Atchison’s deep knowledge of the health space, Earnshaw brings a strong background in entrepreneurship, operations, and building sales teams at high growth startups. Together, with a strong group of supporting leaders, the team has developed an intelligent solution with clear product market fit that is ready to take the world of medical claims by storm.
We are thrilled to join this journey to erase the headache of manual work in the medical insurance space and look forward to working with this remarkable team! Read more about our investment and Wisedocs here.