What exactly is policy management software, and how can it be useful?

A solid and comprehensive set of policies and procedures serves as the foundation for any business and is critical to its success.

Policies and procedures work together to guide your organisation and reduce liability risks. They promote consistency throughout your organisation - for both employees and customers - and set internal and external expectations.

What exactly is the problem? The ever-changing laws, regulations, and compliance best practices can make it difficult to keep your policies up to date.

If you fail to do so, you neglect to keep your employees informed of and following the most recent information, which accomplishes exactly the opposite of what your policies were supposed to achieve.

When employees perform their duties based on outdated information, your company runs the risk of non-compliance, which can result in lawsuits, fines, penalties, scandals, injuries, and other consequences.

What is policy management software?

Insurance Policy management software is a tool that allows users to centrally organise and manage all of their policy and procedure documents.

This type of software allows legal and other teams to work together to create, edit, and maintain policy and procedure documents. Employees can also digitally attest to having read and understood the policies.

Policy management tools also include security features such as access controls and administrator privileges to prevent unauthorized users from editing, reviewing, or approving policies.

What are the advantages of policy management software for your company?

It would be helpful to understand how policy management software would benefit your business if you wanted to replace your fragmented or burdensome policy management system with a powerful, modern tech solution. Simply put, it can help you and your business save time, effort, and money.

Here are some of the most notable advantages of the policy management system:

Enhance policy communication

If employees never hear about policies until a problem arises, you aren't communicating the value and importance of these documents effectively. You can use policy management software to send an automated notification whenever a policy is changed or when it is time for an annual review.

When an important company compliance event occurs, the software will automatically notify employees (such as an audit or accreditation review). All of this automation ensures that employees have up-to-date information without you having to remember to notify everyone.

It increases the value and importance of policies for employees by improving communication. They have a better understanding of how policies affect their jobs, why these policies are important, and what has changed from previous versions. All of this contributes to increased compliance throughout the organisation.

Easy policy collaboration

Policies are typically reviewed by multiple people before being implemented. Subject matter experts, department heads, executives, general counsel, and others must collaborate to develop and modify policies and procedures.

This collaborative process can be made more difficult by using email or even online word processors. It's not always clear who made which changes, what concerns others have, and who signed off on which changes and when. There are simply too many moving parts in the policy creation (and modification) process to rely on such a haphazard approach.

To no one's surprise, this method adds unnecessary delays to the process and increases the likelihood that a few steps will be overlooked or forgotten entirely.

Policy management systems provide tools for automating the review and approval processes via repeatable, consistent workflows.

Not only can you track all of the changes, but you can also leave comments, receive notifications when something needs your approval, and receive accurate approval confirmation before moving on to the next step. Best of all, these steps can be repeated indefinitely, ensuring that the appropriate people have seen and approved the changes before they go live.

Document control and security

Every employee does not need to be aware of every policy. In fact, in some highly regulated industries, not every employee is legally permitted to view every company policy or document.

For example, you wouldn't give a lower-level employee access to upper-management-level documents that they could change or delete. Document-level security is difficult to achieve with most shared drives or cloud-hosting

Document control and security are built into policy management software solutions. You can control not only who has access to each document, but also their level of access, such as viewing, editing, approving, or even removing the document from the system.

Policy management software is designed to lower your liability. To do so, you'll need strong security options that you can control and rely on to ensure that the right employees get the right access every time.

Tracking compliance

The ability to track who has seen and signed a policy is an important aspect of risk management.

Too often, businesses rely on manual methods like paper sign-off sheets, spreadsheets, or even email-read receipts, which are insufficient to hold employees accountable.

You can easily track each step of this process with a policy management solution. You'll know when employees were informed of a policy or change, when they opened the document, and when they electronically signed it.

This gives you the assurance that you did everything possible to inform the employee of the policy. You can also demonstrate that employees understood the company's expectations.

Using policy management software reduces your liability if and when a policy violation occurs in the future.

Robust version controls

In some cases, you must not only prove that an employee signed a policy, but also the exact wording of the policy at the time they signed it.

This can be difficult to prove if you work in an industry where information is constantly changing. However, this is not the case with policy management software. You can use the robust version control to retrieve the exact version that an employee signed to prove the wording on that specific date.

This aids in compliance tracking. It's also worth noting that policy management software only makes the most recent version available to employees. This eliminates the need for hidden folders or other workarounds.

Instead, previous revisions are stored within the policy management software but are not accessible to the public until you need them.

Conclusion

Policy management is a critical insurance process that must be handled with the utmost care. The best insurance policy software is one that is powered by new process automation advances. It paves the way for the smooth operation of the entire policy management process, from policy issuance to required analysis. Policy management systems provide a number of benefits through automation, including increased operational efficiency, significant cost and time savings, advanced analytics, and increased productivity.

At Amity Software, we employ cutting-edge technology and software that helps to boost productivity. Insurance companies can streamline their operations and pave the way for success with the aid of reliable insurance policy management software. Our policy management tool streamlines claim processing, streamlines the underwriting procedure, and aids in fraud prevention.