Applied Epic Policy Checking enables you to automate the most tedious part of the policy checking process and offers you a range of tools to locate differences in your documents easily, so that you can focus your attention on analyzing these differences instead. In addition to these time savings, Policy Checking provides a repeatable process for your staff that you can track through Epic reporting and activities.
Whenever you have policy documents that you want to compare—to each other, to a carrier quotation, or to your proposal. You can leverage Policy Checking throughout the policy life cycle. Agents and brokers have a longstanding commitment to validate that what a carrier delivers in the form of a policy contract aligns to the coverages confirmed and sold to customers. Use Policy Checking as an automated means of validating your clients’ insurance policies.
Policy checking is a coverage validation tool, not a coverage analysis tool. The analysis is up to you as a user. It will not tell you why two documents are different, whether those differences matter, or what conversations you may need to have with your clients and carriers as a result. What it can do is help you locate those differences quickly and systematically, so you can devote more of your time to those decisions and conversations.
Policy Checking offers an assortment of comparison tools to aid you in comparing multiple documents and document types. The ones you choose will depend on a number of factors, including the type and complexity of the policy, the goal of your comparison, and the point in the policy life cycle at which you perform the check. For a detailed explanation of each policy checking tool and Applied’s recommendations for a number of common Policy Checking scenarios, click here.
Yes! Policy Checking supports and expedites your time-tested process. It automates the tedious work of locating and highlighting the differences between documents so you can focus your expertise where it matters: in analyzing and determining the significance of those differences.
As with any automated process, using Policy Checking consistently is the key to achieving proficiency. We recommend progressing from simple to complex policy checks to familiarize yourself with the tools available. Applied’s training courses provide a structured guide to mastering Policy Checking. Navigate to Applied University for Applied Epic in the Product Information area of the Applied Community and look for the courses available in the Policy Checking section. As you gain experience with the tools, the time savings will be significant.
Although you can perform as many checks as you like on as many client accounts as you like, you cannot include documents from two different accounts in the same check. If some of the policy documents you intend to compare are on one client account and a schedule is attached to a related account, you must copy the schedule to the same account as the other documents before submitting the policy check.
Yes, the built-in checklists will search for matching text in disparate documents. However, Policy Checking is not a coverage analysis tool. It can identify similar or dissimilar paragraphs and standard coverage forms, but comparing the standard checks for dissimilar carriers and policies requires you to exercise your own expertise in analyzing the coverages.
Only the owner of a policy check can access the results, but you can reassign the owner as many times as necessary during the course of the check (for example, if different team members are responsible for a first and second pass). See Policy Checking Results and Reassign a Policy Checking Comparison for detailed instructions.
Automated custom checks are not available at this time. However, if there are common checks you want your staff to perform (for example, for equipment schedules, serial numbers, loss payees, or VINs), add the custom check, and then perform a text search for the same criteria. Use the text search when you toggle back and forth between Snippet and Match view.
At this time, the Policy document type dropdown menu options cannot be modified. Applied Epic Policy Checking currently supports the following document types:
If your agency would benefit from additional document type options, please submit an idea on the Applied Product Advisory Community.
However, remember that you can compare most types of documents, even if they do not match one of these options exactly. You must designate one of the documents in your check as a Policy, but your document type selections do not affect the outcome of your check. Just select the Policy document type that describes your document most closely and make sure any other users involved in the check understand your selection.
Yes. All documents must be saved as client attachments in Applied Epic to be used in a policy check.
Yes. Policy checking supports PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel files, and you can compare files of different types to each other within the same check.
Policy Checking relies on optical character recognition (OCR) to “read” characters that it recognizes as text in a PDF document, which is technically an image. As you select PDFs for comparison, remember that better-quality documents tend to produce better results. PDFs downloaded from carrier websites are preferable to scanned documents. Carrier document structure (for example, the formatting of tables, logos, images, and photographs on the declarations page) can also affect the way Policy Checking reads a document.
Spreadsheets (XLSX, XLS, and CSV files) do not have “pages” as such and behave somewhat differently than other documents. Matched areas is deselected by default for spreadsheets, but matched areas in the spreadsheets display in black rather than gray text. Lock scrolling functionality does not work when used on spreadsheets, since they can scroll both horizontally and vertically. To compare spreadsheets, consider using Unmatched/Partial matches in Match view to identify the differences between the documents in red.
No. Policy Checking supports both searchable and non-searchable PDFs as source documents for comparison.
Yes, but because handwriting by its nature is less consistent than typed text, we recommend subjecting these portions of your documents to additional review.
You can, but it is best suited to commercial lines. For most personal lines comparisons, the Service Summary Comparison report may provide better results. However, Policy Checking may be helpful for high net-worth personal lines policies, which often resemble small- or mid-market commercial lines policies in their structure and complexity.
Although there is no technical limitation on the number of documents you can include in the check, remember that the tool only identifies differences in the documents, and the task of analyzing those differences is still up to you. As a rule of thumb, use the same number of documents in each policy check that you can effectively manage in a manual workflow.
Remember to complete your checks in a timely manner. Policy Checking Comparisons remain accessible in the system for 60 days after you receive the results of the automated check, after which time you can no longer open them.
We recommend performing both a positive check (Snippet view) and a negative check (Match view) in almost all circumstances. Take time to anchor each document in the check on the left side of the screen—as well as re-anchoring each document in Match view—to validate its contents and avoid missing any differences. Changing the focus of the search allows you to confirm the tool’s efficacy. To anchor a document, click the tab above the document on the left and select the document from the dropdown menu.
You can upload approximately 150MB of files in a single policy check. Note that this limit is cumulative for all documents included in the check, not for each document individually.
That depends on the size of the documents you submit. OCR processing time increases with higher page counts. You may receive results for comparisons on small policies within a matter of minutes, while comparisons containing thousands of pages will likely take more than an hour to process.