An insurance company in Overland Park, Kansas, turned to Adventure Tech [1] when it needed a way to completely integrate the storage of documents with claims processing to streamline the procedure for everyone involved.

The enterprise's primary business system is an IBM i using iSafari to interface to an external webserver for HTML and document presentation. The client's goal was to eliminate the local printing/scanning of documents because the vast majority of claims were arriving electronically via faxes or email. As a solution, Adventure Tech designed a system in which a claim is initiated from the client's website, and then documents are either faxed in with the provided coversheet or attached and transmitted via HTTP.

In addition, the insurance company wanted users to be able to print any documents they had open and attach this print to a claim.

Adventure Tech's answer was to use .NET to write two processes. The first comes into action when a user clicks the print button and is prompted to enter a claim number and a brief description of the document. The claim number is validated via a web request behind the scenes to iSafari. If approved, the .NET process PDF's the document and passes it and other information over the the second process.

This second procedure takes the document and corresponding information and determines if the document is already PFD'd. If not, the process performs that task and then notifies iSafari via a web post that it has a document to be stored. It then passes the document information so that iSafari can post the material into the storage system.

Adventure Tech's second process also handles documents passed to the system from iSafari, which received them, via Internet web pages where agents can attach documents to a claim as they are working on it. The solution also handles documents passed to it from the fax software package that strips pertinent claim information from a predefined coversheet.