NTUC Income moves on to automate pre-hospitalisation and post-hospitalisation claims processes by embedding cognitive technologies operationally. NTUC Income receives an average of 14,000 hard copies of IncomeShield pre-hospitalisation and post-hospitalisation claims a month, which are being currently reviewed, assessed and approved manually.

A significant number of man hours are spent on data entry before claims data can be processed to enable payouts. Hence, to better manage claims the insurer is adopting IBM’s Datacap that combines advanced imaging, business rules, natural language processing and machine-learning technologies to automatically classify and extract information in real-time from most types of documents.

This in turn also eliminates labour-intensive manual data entry from paper claims, Business Times reports.

See: Aviva Singapore Digitises Claims Process for Group Insurance Customers

To process claims, NTUC Income said it is using IBM Watson Explorer, a cognitive search and content analysis platform, at different stages of the insurance life cycle. Through use of this platform it can read both structured and unstructured data, such as medical certificates and bills, length of hospital stays, surgical procedures, medical history and other contributing factors.

Taking these into consideration, the system makes claims recommendations and calculates payouts to policyholders. Andrew Yeo, Income’s general manager for life and health insurance thinks, this move is significant especially as the insurer expects claims volume to rise amidst Singapore’s growing population.

Also read: Increasing Gap between Employees Healthcare Needs and Benefits Offered by Employers

Feature image credit: ntuc.org.sg