Speeding Up the Demand Stage for Law Firms with Legal Services Outsourcing

Speeding Up the Demand Stage for Law Firms with Legal Services Outsourcing

The “demand stage” is the time between completing injury treatment and negotiations for payment of the injury claim. A typical personal injury demand package includes documentation of all expenses relevant to the injury claim, including medical reports, medical bills, invoices, police reports, ambulance reports. Also included are medical facility names, dates of services provided, date of incidents, medical history, ICD medical codes, medical charges, adjustments etc.

The Challenge of Demand (Settlement) Stage

The number of supporting documents in a Demand Package is large. The larger the claim, or the count of claimants, the larger the count of documents. To aid settlement all these documents need to be labelled. All documents need to be tagged and annotated. Labelling and annotation must be quick so that the time spent during the demand stage is kept short. The labelling and annotation must be accurate.

Our client, a legal services company, sought our legal outsourcing services faced with the following challenges:

• Volume of Work: As their number of customers increased, they were able to service them with ARDEM.
• Limited Internal Resources: Labelling and Annotation requires the ability to comprehend and process hundreds and thousands of medical reports, label them and annotate them correctly, and quickly. ARDEM was able to do this.

Requirement for Medical Report Annotation and Labelling

The scope of the work required annotation and labelling of up to 50,000 documents every week. There was a significant amount of field input. Annotation was required for physical injuries, treatment taken, injury types, and medical charges.

Documents had to be identified, sorted and segregated. Medical Reports, Medical Bills, Invoices, Police reports, Ambulance reports all categorized and labelled.

Annotation was required for payment documents such as medical bills, invoices, and statements.

Solving the Annotation and Labelling Challenge

High volume of documents. The need for fast and accurate processing. The requirement to meet tight document processing deadlines required rapid to meet tight customer deadlines required agile project management.

1. Selecting Qualified Team and Defining Work Processes

Work instructions and workflows were defined for each work step. Workflow which ensured that every detail related to physical injuries, treatment details, injury types, and medical charges was captured with precision.

Having team members with a medical background made identifying, sorting and segregating documents go faster and with greater accuracy. The team members were familiar with medical terminology and with ICD, medical charge codes.

Rapidly training a large team of analysts who could label and annotate correctly was needed. They had to be trained in the different types of documents that they would be processing. They had to be trained to be able to quickly review the documents, comprehend the contents and annotate and label as per the rules defined.

2. Setting Performance Metrics

High volume of daily work. Daily deadlines. Requirement for high accuracy. Large team size.
Daily work planning and work management was required. Daily team targets and individual team member targets were defined. Daily performance feedback was provided to the team members to facilitate continuous improvement.

3. Scaling Team size as Annotation Volume Increased

As the client customer count grew ARDEM was there to help with scaling the team assigned to our client. Adding qualified talent quickly. Training new team members quickly. Helping them meet client performance expectations quickly. Not only were deadlines met but client expectations were exceeded.

4. And Always 100% Accuracy in Annotation

Like in all assignments strict quality assurance processes were put in place. Quality Plans, Quality Checklists, Audits, up to 100% verification of an analyst’s work, daily feedback to the team members to facilitate continuous quality improvement were all part of our workflow.

Delivering Success in Annotation and Labelling

Outsourcing of the Annotation and Labelling tasks to ARDEM was a winning proposition for our client. Our client was able to provide their services to more injury lawyers and handle larger Demand (Settlement) cases with our pool of qualified talent.

Our client was able to shorten the Demand (Settlement) stage time by outsourcing the annotation and labelling tasks to us.

Our client improved the accuracy of Labelling and Annotation of Demand documents with the deployment of our quality protocols.