National Farmers Union P/C Notes Complete Deployment of Bridium’s Claims3 Application

National Farmers Union Property and Casualty Company (“National Farmers Union”), a provider of property and liability insurance to customers in rural areas nationwide rated A- by A.M. Best, and Bridium, a technology provider and custom services company for the insurance industry, announced the full deployment of Claims3, an Internet-based application for multi-line claims processing.

According to Chris Kircher, senior vice president of Claims for National Farmers Union, “We selected Bridium’s Claims3 solution for a number of reasons including its superior functionality, robust platform, capability to interface with our existing infrastructure, ease of use, ability to allow remote access to off-site users, and the fact that we could implement it quickly.

“Already, in the early stages since its deployment, Claims3 has exceeded our expectations. The learning curve of our 90-person claims department was shorter than expected. They quickly found it to be user-friendly and extremely easy to navigate. In fact, our outsourced workers’ compensation claims department, which works with a number of claims processing systems, tells us Claims3 is one of the easiest claims processing applications to navigate and work with,” Kircher added.

Bridium serves as National Farmers Union’s exclusive application service provider (ASP) and remotely hosts its claims administration and processing systems. The company’s data is housed at Bridium’s data center. Using industry standard encryption technologies, data is transferred real-time via the Internet from the user’s personal computer.

In addition, Claims3 is integrated with National Farmers Union’s internal policy management and accounts payable systems, as well as third-party vendors that include:

— Lynx, its 24-hour call center for claims reporting,

— GAB, a TPA which handles National Farmers Union’s workers’ comp claims in select jurisdictions, and

— Tymetrics, a legal bill review service.

Bridium also brought additional third-party services already integrated to Claims3 including:

— ISO ClaimSearch,

— MRB Reporting Bureau, police report retrieval service, and

— INFORM Applications, an integrated reporting solution.

Claims3 replaced an AS 400 claims handling system, which National Farmers Union could not reportedly update adequately to keep pace with its business needs and growth. Bridium’s Business Solutions team customized its “rules-based” Claims3 application to meet National Farmers Union’s particular claims handling needs to include such features as:

— Rules-based Workflow and Diary,

— Letter tool with integrated distribution via e-mail or fax,

— Integrated Salvage and Subrogation processes, and

— Integrated Document Management.