Roots’ Digital Coworker Helps Eastern Improve its Insurance Processing Speed

Roots Automation, creator of the AI-powered Digital Coworker and InsurGPT, a generative AI model for insurance, announced that Eastern Alliance Insurance Group (Eastern) has chosen Roots to significantly improve processing speed with its Digital Coworker.

Eastern, part of ProAssurance Group, is a commercial carrier specializing in workers’ compensation. This decision has saved Eastern more than 2,700 human hours since Q1 2023, according to the companies.

A leading workers’ compensation provider since 1997, Eastern’s claims department was dealing with a significant volume of highly variable (unstructured) incoming documents that needed to be analyzed, indexed, and routed to the correct recipient in a timely manner to support Eastern’s claim-handling processing.

Its mailroom team, the first team to interact with these documents, was handling all documents manually, placing pressure on the team’s capacity and impacting claims handling efficiency. Eastern turned to Roots Automation’s Digital Coworker for support.

Eastern and Roots evaluated use cases across Eastern’s claims organization and identified document intake and indexing as a priority. A new Digital Coworker, developed leveraging Root’s proprietary Generative AI solution, InsurGPT, reduced processing speed for priority-five mail (the highest-volume mail) to one hour from five days. 

The Digital Coworker achieved this 100-fold improvement in processing speed by accurately and efficiently receiving, analyzing, processing, and indexing the mail while also bolstering accuracy by reducing the probability of human error and ensuring the documents were easily retrievable.

This enabled Eastern’s mailroom team to concentrate on more strategic, higher-value activities. Additionally, this empowered Eastern to focus on improvements to other business areas.

“We began working with Roots in 2022 as part of a larger corporate strategy to use technology to be more efficient and to better serve our customers,” said Harry Talbert, senior vice president of information systems for ProAssurance. “Roots is focused on the insurance industry, so they speak our language and understand our need to make business decisions in a short timeframe. After experiencing how the Digital Coworker supercharged claims document indexing, Eastern is looking to add additional Digital Coworkers to our underwriting and claims teams.”

Roots recently received $22.2 million in Series B funding to expand upon its work with Eastern and the broader insurance industry and to continue to address the challenges contributing to premium leakage.

“A recent survey of underwriters found a loss of more than 40% operational capacity due to manual entry and reworking of underwriting data, leading to premium leakage,” said Chaz Perera, CEO and co-founder of Roots Automation. “Roots Automation’s proprietary tools and AI technologies effectively ingest, analyze and process unstructured information held within documents into structured data, faster and more accurately than any other solution available, empowering insurers to reduce costs and enable their teams to be more productive.”

For more information about this news, visit www.rootsautomation.com.