“Segmentation And Load Balancing Platform System” in Patent Application Approval Process (USPTO 20200327618)

2020 NOV 03 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- A patent application by the inventors Blakeman, Cory R. (Kansas City, MO); Edwards, Paul J. (West Hartford, CT); Shemesh, Keren (West Hartford, CT), filed on June 26, 2020, was made available online on October 15, 2020, according to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by NewsRx correspondents.

This patent application is assigned to Hartford Fire Insurance Company (Hartford, Connecticut, United States).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “An insurer may provide payments when claims are made in connection with an insurance policy. For example, an employee who is injured while working might receive payments associated with a workers’ compensation insurance policy purchased by his or her employer. Similarly, a person involved in an automobile accident may receive a payment in connection with an automobile insurance policy. The insurer may assign a claim handler to communicate with a claimant, an employer, another insurer, and/or medical service providers to help determine the appropriate amount of payment. Note that submitted claims may involve various amounts of work by a claim handler. For example, one type or segment of insurance claim might be relatively straightforward while another segment of claims involve complex determinations of liability and/or injury issues.

“In one approach, a received insurance claim is simply assigned to a claim handler in a random or round robin manner. This, however, might lead to one claim handler having a significantly more complex workload as compared to another claim handler. Moreover, manually determining the complexity of an insurance claim, and/or which claim handler it should be assigned, can be a time consuming and error prone task, especially when there are a substantial number of claims, of many different types, to be analyzed. For example, an insurer might receive tens of thousands of new insurance claims each year (which might represent a billion dollars of potential liability). It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods to facilitate the assignment of insurance claims to appropriate segments and/or to claim handlers in an automated, efficient, and accurate manner.”

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent application, NewsRx journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent application: “According to some embodiments, systems, methods, apparatus, computer program code and means may facilitate the assignment of insurance claims to appropriate segments and/or claim handlers. In some embodiments, a communication device may receive data indicative of a plurality of insurance claims submitted in connection with insurance policies. It may then be automatically determined that a first insurance claim is associated with a first type of insurance and that a second insurance claim is associated with a second type of insurance. The received data associated with the first insurance claim may be analyzed in accordance with first segmentation logic to determine a first segment classification appropriate for the first insurance claim. Similarly, the received data associated with the second insurance claim may be automatically analyzed in accordance with second segmentation logic to determine a second segment classification appropriate for the second insurance claim. Indications of the first and second segment classifications may then be transmitted (e.g., to a load balancing and assignment engine that automatically selects claim handlers for insurance claims).

“A technical effect of some embodiments of the invention is an improved and computerized method to facilitate the assignment of insurance claims to appropriate segments and/or claim handlers. With these and other advantages and features that will become hereinafter apparent, a more complete understanding of the nature of the invention can be obtained by referring to the following detailed description and to the drawings appended hereto.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A system, comprising: a communication device to receive claim data for a plurality of claims submitted in connection with policies of a first coverage type and a second coverage type; a computer storage unit for receiving, storing, and providing the claim data for the plurality of claims; a claims processing computer system coupled to the computer storage unit, the claims processing computer system including: a segmentation platform processor in communication with the computer storage unit, wherein the segmentation platform processor is configured for automatically determining, for each claim of the plurality of claims, a segment classification based on application of segmentation logic applicable to the claim; and a load balancing and assignment engine configured for: receiving a segment classification comprising one of a first segment classification indication or a second segment classification indication for each of the plurality of claims from the segmentation platform processor; accessing a claim handler database to identify eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims based on the one of the first segment classification indication or the second segment classification indication for each of the plurality of claims; determining a load for each of the eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims; automatically selecting, for each of the plurality of claims based on the determined load for each of the corresponding eligible claim handlers for the claim, assignment of each claim to one of the eligible claim handlers and a case manager; and transmitting an electronic file for each of the plurality of claims to the assigned one of the claim handler and the case manager.

“2. The system of claim 1, further comprising a claim intake computer system configured for receiving the claim data corresponding to the plurality of claims of the first coverage type and the second coverage type, wherein the claims processing computer system is further coupled to the claim intake computer system.

“3. The system of claim 1, wherein the segmentation logic comprises first segmentation logic applicable to claims of the first coverage type and second segmentation logic applicable to claims of the second coverage type.

“4. The system of claim 3, wherein automatically determining the segment classification for each claim of the plurality of claims comprises: analyzing, for each of the claims associated with the first coverage type, the received data associated with the claim, in accordance with the first segmentation logic, to determine a first segment classification appropriate for the claim; and analyzing, for each of the claims associated with the second coverage type, the received data associated with the claim, in accordance with the second segmentation logic different from the first segmentation logic, to determine a second segment classification appropriate for the claim.

“5. The system of claim 4, wherein the claims processing computer system includes a configurable segment ranking table for configuring the first segmentation logic; and wherein said analyzing the received data associated with the claim, in accordance with the first segmentation logic, comprises: determining an injury driven foundation segment; applying non-injury driven rules to determine a non-injury driven segment; and selecting one of the injury driven foundation segment and the non-injury driven segment based on the configurable segment ranking table.

“6. The system of claim 1, wherein the load balancing and assignment engine being configured for determining the load for each of the eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims comprises: accessing data indicative of a number of other claims currently assigned to each of the eligible claim handlers; and determining an adjusted load based on the accessed data indicative of the number of other claims currently assigned and one or more of data indicative of paid time off information for each of the eligible claim handlers and a load factor indicative of a claim-handling ability of the eligible claim handlers.

“7. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the segmentation platform processor and the load balancing and assignment engine are implemented by a predictive model trained with historical claim information; wherein the predictive model is associated with at least one of: (i) a computer-implemented neural network, (ii) a computer-implemented Bayesian network, (iii) a computer-implemented Hidden Markov model, (iv) a computer-implemented expert system, (v) a computer-implemented decision tree, (vii) a computer-implemented collection of decision trees, (viii) a computer-implemented support vector machine, and (ix) computer-implemented weighted factors.

“8. The system of claim 7, further comprising a model training component computer processor configured to: receive a plurality of historical data sets comprising the historical claim information from the computer storage unit; apply one or both of a variable association data reduction process and a granularity reduction process to the plurality of historical data sets to generate reduced historical data sets and reduce a dimensionality of the plurality of historical data sets; and train, based upon the reduced historical data sets, a predictive model to determine segment classifications based upon claims data.

“9. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, by a communication device data indicative of a plurality of claims submitted in connection with policies providing at least a first coverage type and a second coverage type different from the first coverage type; storing, by a computer storage unit, the data indicative of the plurality of claims; automatically determining, by a segmentation platform processor of a claims processing computer system, for each claim of the plurality of claims, a segment classification based on application of segmentation logic applicable to the claim; receiving, by the load balancing and assignment engine from the segmentation platform processor, a segment classification indication for each of the plurality of claims comprising one of a first segment classification indication and a second segment classification indication; accessing, by the load balancing and assignment engine, a claim handler database to identify eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims based on the one of the first segment classification indication or the second segment classification indication for each of the plurality of claims; determining, by the load balancing and assignment engine, a load for each of the eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims; automatically selecting, by the load balancing and assignment engine, for each of the plurality of claims based on the adjusted load for each of the corresponding eligible claim handlers for the claim, assignment of each claim to one of the eligible claim handlers and a case manager; and transmitting, by the load balancing and assignment engine, an electronic file for each of the plurality of claims to the assigned one of the eligible claim handlers and the case manager.

“10. The computer-implemented method of claim 9, wherein the data indicative of a plurality of claims is received by the communication device of a claim intake computer system.

“11. The computer-implemented method of claim 9, wherein the segmentation logic comprises first segmentation logic applicable to claims of the first coverage type and second segmentation logic applicable to claims of the second coverage type.

“12. The computer-implemented method of claim 11, wherein automatically determining the segment classification for each claim of the plurality of claims comprises: analyzing, for each of the claims associated with the first coverage type, the received data associated with the claim, in accordance with the first segmentation logic, to determine the first segment classification appropriate for the claim; and analyzing, for each of the claims associated with the second coverage type, the received data associated with the claim, in accordance with the second segmentation logic different from the first segmentation logic, to determine the second segment classification appropriate for the claim.

“13. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, further comprising configuring the first segmentation logic and the second segmentation logic with a configurable segment ranking table.

“14. The computer-implemented method of claim 9, wherein determining the load for each of the eligible claim handlers for each of the plurality of claims is based upon an adjusted load, the adjusted load based on: data indicative of a number of other claims currently assigned to each of the eligible claim handlers; and one or more of data indicative of paid time off information for each of the eligible claim handlers and a load factor indicative of a claim-handling ability of the eligible claim handlers.

“15. The computer-implemented method of claim 9, wherein steps performed by at least one of the segmentation platform processor and the load balancing and assignment engine are implemented by a predictive model trained with historical claim information.

“16. The computer-implemented method of claim 15, further comprising training, by a model training component computer processor based upon the historical claim information, a predictive model to determine segment classifications for claims by: receiving a plurality of historical data sets comprising the historical claim information from the computer storage unit; applying one or both of a variable association data reduction process and a granularity reduction process to the plurality of historical data sets to generate reduced historical data sets and reduce a dimensionality of the plurality of historical data sets; and training, based upon the reduced historical data sets, the predictive model to determine segment classifications based upon claims data.”

URL and more information on this patent application, see: Blakeman, Cory R.; Edwards, Paul J.; Shemesh, Keren. Segmentation And Load Balancing Platform System. Filed June 26, 2020 and posted October 15, 2020. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220200327618%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20200327618&RS=DN/20200327618

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