Mutual Insurer Streamlines Claims Management and Reporting

Wisconsin Municipal Mutual Insurance Company (WMMIC) provides workers’ compensation, general liability, auto liability and public officials’ error and omissions liability insurance, and claims management, to two cities and 15 counties in the state.

The Brown County Professional Football Stadium District also relies on WMMIC for special officials’ errors and omissions liability insurance in its role as a co-owner of Lambeau Field, home of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers.

WMMIC opened for business in 1987 and after several years of claims processing through a third-party administrator in Colorado, it moved that operation in-house at its Madison headquarters and soon began a long relationship with CSC and its RISKMASTER® Accelerator claims administration software.

Moving Work Inside

In the past, Jan Clingman, the company’s accounting and data manager, trekked checks and data to another mutual insurer on the other side of town, along with creating reports for mailing to the members. Logistics were one problem, and accuracy was another. Clingman created a DOS-based in-house system that provided a simple yet accurate method for tracking claim and loss data which served the company well for several more years.

However, WMMIC wanted more. “We wanted something that the members could access themselves, and create their own reports, and be able to monitor their claims and the data that went with those claims whenever they chose to do so,” Clingman said. Based on recommendations from some of its members who already were CSC customers, and on its own due diligence, WMMIC adopted RISKMASTER more than a decade ago.

That relationship with CSC brought scalability, improved accuracy and software management and support as the mutual insurer continued to enhance its centralized handling of injury, liability and auto claims.

Growing Caseloads, Capabilities

As its caseload grew to its current size of 300 to 400 claims a month with a running caseload of 13,000 to 14,000, WMMIC kept up with the advances in RISKMASTER Accelerator, including the pivotal move to Business Analytics.

Business Analytics consolidates data from diverse sources and supports a full range of reporting capabilities. At WMMIC, that means being able to run monthly reports for each member and then simply posting them on a secure website, furthering the combined enterprise’s ability to extend incident reporting to the cities’ and counties’ own risk managers.

“Business Analytics has been fantastic. We use that all the time for all our reporting now,” Clingman said. “Our members really like being able to access the system whenever they need to, enter their own events and look up claims any time they need to.”

WMMIC is deploying its new tools in several areas. “We’ve really been getting into the loss control piece of it now,” Clingman said. “We’re hiring a risk and loss control specialist, and we’re now running frequency and severity reports. We’re also offering training based on some of our loss areas where we’ve found that the frequency is a little higher.”

RISKMASTER Accelerator also has helped in more granular ways, such as the handling of communications between inside and outside people involved in the claims process while integrating with Microsoft Outlook.

“With email, when we get information like medical notes or legal notes from any of our outside attorneys or medical people, we actually add those into the enhanced notes section,” Clingman said. “And whenever we send emails from RISKMASTER Accelerator through Outlook, it automatically saves them to the system.”

Learning From Others

Clingman and her colleagues also take advantage of the mutual learning opportunities presented to them as members of the RISKMASTER Accelerator user community. WMMIC is a longtime participant in the annual Connect conference and local and regional gatherings as well as online communities such as WikonnecT.

“It’s been really great, working with the people that we work with on the phone, the technical support, then meeting them in person, being able to come in and access our own data in the lab and getting some hands-on help, tips and ideas,” the WMMIC accounting and data manager said.

Clingman added, “We’ve become friends with several of the RISKMASTER clients, and we network with them too, and find out what they like and problems that they might be having. We trade reports and we’ve been able sometimes to solve each other’s issues.”