IMA Financial Helps Clients Control Losses

IMA Expands Services

Formed by four independent agents in 1974, the company has grown to the 11th largest privately held U.S. insurance broker, providing a full range of risk management-related products, as well as third-party administration (TPA) services for self-insured organizations and pools.

To support growth, IMA Financial needed to expand its TPA services, but to do that the company needed to replace its 20-year-old in-house claims management system. Even worse, the only programmer able to work on the system was nearing retirement.

“Our clients were starting to ask for information and detailed data analysis that we simply couldn’t provide with our legacy system,” said David Buttram, project analyst, IMA Financial Group.

Supporting Nationwide Programs

The company reviewed software products available, narrowed the field to a handful of technology vendors, and chose CSC’s RISKMASTER software. RISKMASTER provided a central place for risk and claims reporting and analysis, and it allowed data to be imported from multiple sources.

That new flexibility allows IMA Financial to offer comprehensive, nationwide insurance brokerage and reporting services to restaurants, energy suppliers, hotels and apartment management firms. Under one program, the company is supporting a leading U.S. drive-in restaurant chain.

“We actually upload the company’s claims from TPAs and carriers into RISKMASTER so we’ve got them all in one place. It allows us to do reporting and claims management and give them a lot more detailed information about everything that’s going on with their claims,” Buttram said.

The job of supporting these programs would be daunting without RISKMASTER, he added.

“To get losses from five different carriers and bring them all together in an Excel spreadsheet is just overwhelming,” he said. “We can get the data from the carriers uploaded into RISKMASTER and provide one interface that allows our internal claims people that work with the companies and the clients, especially high-dollar claims, to make sure that everything goes the best for our clients. And it also allows us to provide loss runs with consolidated data to our clients.”

Improved Data Analysis

Detailed claims analysis and business intelligence is a key service IMA Financial provides clients.

“The reporting functionally is dynamic and offers multiple options to track and report loss trends,” Buttram said. “It is also highly flexible. We can quickly run the same report for four different clients.”

Among the monthly reports that IMA Financial provides to help clients increase visibility into loss trends is the change report.

“This report compares the loss dollars and counts of a particular month to the loss dollars and counts of previous months,” said Butram. “It provides the 10,000-foot view, so they can see where they changed, up or down, and then go back to the loss run and even filter it by that particular year, or that particular coverage type, to see which claims created those numbers.”

IMA is also able to give clients Web access to the reports, so that they can drill down and look at an actual claim and run a variety of reports any time they wish.

To make risk and loss prevention data easy to understand and analyze, IMA Financial uses the RISKMASTER dashboard feature, which gives risk and claims managers an at-a-glance view of key metrics. The company can offer clients a standard dashboard or a custom version that tracks additional data.

“Right now, our clients can get a quarterly dashboard that we can put out on the Web to access,” he said. “We’re working toward making the process dynamic so that any time they get on and look at the dashboard, it’s up to date. We’re working with CSC on how to make that happen.”

IMA Financial’s Risk Control department uses RISKMASTER to help clients analyze and mitigate losses related to injuries, locations and other factors.

“Our risk control department was clamoring for data and different ways of slicing and dicing it for our clients,” Buttram said. “Our team can work with them to reduce or eliminate various accidents and injuries and really reduce their claims costs.

“The neat thing is that the reports we provide clients show that trend of downward movement, and how using both of our services is really benefitting them because they’re saving money.”

Continually Enhancing the Software

With the new system in place, the company is working with CSC to continually enhance the software and help improve services to its clients. One example involves specialized reporting requirements for the Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP Extension Act.

CSC worked with IMA Financial and other companies to incorporate the new reporting requirement in RISKMASTER and set up the EDI formats for submitting to state agencies — well in advance of the deadline.

“Using the tools that are built into RISKMASTER, it is much easier for us to process these specialized reports, and our clients are greatly relieved that they are working with a technology provider that has made the process run so smoothly.”

Buttram said an additional benefit of IMA Financial’s relationship with CSC is interaction with other RISKMASTER clients at conferences such as CSC Connect.

“Every time I attend one of these conferences, I learn something new,” he said. “I look for any way that we can streamline a process, make it easier on our adjusters or automate something that wasn’t automated.”

Get More Information

Watch a video interview with David Buttram, project analyst at IMA Financial.