Vhi Group works to help 1.1 million customers via a diverse and growing range of products and services. Its clients include private individuals as well as employers offering private healthcare schemes to their staff. In this piece we hear how EASY helped ensure continuity of service during recent busy periods

What do you do when you have hundreds of thousands of policy and claim documents to keep track of? If you’re Dublin-headquartered Vhi and employ over 1,000 people at four locations across the Republic, the answer’s ‘EASY’.

Specifically, EASY’s been helping Vhi for at least two decades with the EASY Archive platform, an electronic archiving solution so stable and reliable and proven at handling whatever high volume of documentation the company throws at it. When Vhi Group needed to expand its product range and, in parallel, overhaul the way it manages customer ‘paperwork, EASY was the obvious first port of call.

“EASY’s been extremely stable as an archive for policy and claims documentation,” confirms the company’s Senior Technical Architect, Claire Moore, who cites the EASY front-end and multiple integrations/connectors as being particular useful. They have made it possible to seamlessly integrate document retrieval with multiple in-house systems and even into the Vhi customer portal.

37 million documents to a new virtualised infrastructure

Recently, Vhi has been beginning to branch out into new areas of business, including mortgage protection and life cover, as well as health and wellbeing programmes.

The opportunity therefore arose to upgrade to the very latest document management technology, the company also wanted to be smarter in the way it created, distributed and managed customer documentation. Key targets here, says Claire, included improving the quality and colour of output, tailoring more of the content to individual clients, and finding nice ways to ‘reward’ policy-holders for choosing the online documentation option.

With more expected variance in the content, Vhi also wanted to be able to archive exact copies of everything that had been issued to each customer. On the claims side, additional content for retention would also now need to include electronic capture of evidence/receipts submitted via a new VHI ‘Snap and Send’ app.

So all was well and the EASY Upgrade Project, commissioned in November 2019, set to task moving Vhi’s already very large document archiving platforms, comprising some 37 million documents to a new virtualised infrastructure offering faster and more up-to-date equipment and Windows operating systems. All that needed to go live in time for significant policy renewals activity set for April/May 2020…

And then COVID struck.

Vhi needed to work hard to deal with the corona crisis

The good news is that despite Lockdown and all the disruption that entailed, the new EASY system went live just as planned, at the end of March. But what about the problem of the big April/May renewals programme?

First, Vhi needed to work hard to deal with the corona crisis. Customer-facing needed to access and process customer documentation and outreach needed to take place with clients about redistributing policy payments in line with disruption to private health services.

The EASY platform supported all of this vital extra activity without incident

“In Ireland, all private hospitals were opened to the public during the outbreak,” Claire points out. “As we were paying out fewer claims at the time, we wanted to pass the money back to our clients.” In practical terms, that meant over three weeks the team needed to send out documents to most of our 1.1 million private healthcare customers, on top of its usual workload.

This new mass contact campaign, re-calculation of policy rates and issuing of new documentation to all Vhi customers was a huge challenge. But the EASY platform supported all of this vital extra activity without incident, she confirms. And because everything is tightly integrated and part of an online offering, the fact that staff were working remotely wasn’t an issue, she adds.

“The continuity of EASY’s service through the lockdown was really impressive: there was no slowdown getting this across the line, which is remarkable,” she says. “The whole team went above and beyond to make this happen..

“That’s one of the things we like best about working with EASY; it makes us feel valued as a customer, as though nothing is too much trouble. We have always felt we are in very safe hands.

“The strong relationship we have with EASY Software and its in-depth understanding of our processes and systems confirmed that we’ve absolutely chosen the right partner,” she concludes.