The Integrative Stream

Online Claims Up

The New York Times reports that as of this year, three-quarters of insurance claims are made online (NYT link, registration required). That’s up from 44% in 2002.

And now, data I can’t source properly: an electronic claim costs $8 to process. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that a paper claim costs $16 (this is from an IBM presentation I recently attended). Surprisingly, twenty minutes of web surfing didn’t produce a good number for total health insurance claims on an annual basis. On the other hand, WellPoint alone processes 2.4 billion claim line items a year, according to this article on payer performance. WellPoint is just one insurance company. Assume 10 line items a claim; that’s 240 million claims a year for a player with relatively small market share (Medicare alone covers 50 million seniors).

Even without making the math fuzzier, there’s still a tremendous amount of money left on the table.