City of Tallahassee manages risks with DXC Insurance RISKMASTER's flexible reporting capabilities

At any given time, the City of Tallahassee has 2,500 city-owned vehicles on the road, ranging from a fleet of public buses that serve the city’s 190,000 residents to rescue equipment, utility trucks and more.

Beyond maintaining the fleet and providing important services, the city must deal with the insurance risks that arise from vehicle accidents and residents’ claims of damaged property.

For 15 years, Tallahassee has used DXC Insurance RISKMASTER^TM claims and risk management software to successfully handle this task. The browser-based software integrates multiple business functions into one cohesive solution to facilitate faster, smoother processes and real-time analytics that help spot trends and mitigate losses.

Crunching Claims

Like many municipalities, Tallahassee operates a self-insurance program that includes general liability, vehicle accident, workers’ compensation and employment practice liability. The city’s risk management division procures and administers commercially purchased insurance.

Tallahassee’s risk management system focuses primarily on general liability and auto claims. It also handles damages caused by natural disasters, as well as minor incidents such as a utility truck accidentally backing into a resident’s mailbox. All of these incidents call for a claims system that is accurate, reliable and available in times of crisis.

Insurance RISKMASTER, the most widely used risk and claims management software in the United States, does the job. It provides a variety of powerful, scalable RMIS analysis and reporting capabilities. The flexible solution offers tightly integrated modules that cover all aspects of the process. It makes reporting and analytics easier to handle and enables service continuity that keeps important city work up and running.

The City of Tallahassee adopted Insurance RISKMASTER in 2001. Prior to that, says Art Pitts, the city’s supervisor of risk management systems and services, Tallahassee’s claims system provided no real financial accountability or reporting capabilities.

Now, he says, “We are able to get better claims data, not only to keep up with claims, but we are able to notice trends.” This gives the city a better idea of what kinds of claims are being made and at what volume, which helps inform budget-planning decisions.

Improving Insights

Insurance RISKMASTER also plays an important operational role in city offices. The system directly records all incidents reported to the city’s risk management department and all insurance transactions, including correspondence, payments and collections. And the hosted customer feature ensures that essential functions, such as paying out workers’ compensation claims, can continue to be performed even if a storm knocks out power throughout the city.

An important function of any claims and risk management system is to generate tailored reports, and Insurance RISKMASTER shines in this regard. “We have not had to partner with outside vendors for filing state records — we’ve been able to do that through RISKMASTER,” Pitts says.

Insurance RISKMASTER enables Pitts’ department to provide monthly custom reports to department directors, as well as other information that can be used to improve city operations.

For example, information gathered by Insurance RISKMASTER helped manage a drivers’ safety initiative in the city’s solid waste division. The system monitored citizens’ claims over the course of a year and generated monthly reports for managers. At the end of the year, drivers who came in below a prescribed claims threshold were able to participate in a driver safety pool, which served as a financial bonus.

In another case, the software was used to improve medical billing reporting as required by Florida law. “RISKMASTER, and some of its modules, lets us do our own direct reporting as opposed to having to go through a third-party vendor to receive, process and send on our behalf. So we don’t have to incur that cost or time with an intermediary to make those filings for us,” says Pitts.

Tailoring the Experience

Another plus for the city is how the software can be tailored to the user. With the Power Views feature, Insurance RISKMASTER provides control over what users see and how they navigate the system. “You can set up Power Views to lay things out in a more cohesive manner so it makes more sense for your user rather than something straight out of the box,” Pitts says.

Insurance RISKMASTER also gives users the ability to add functionalities. In one case, Pitts says, the department added some fields to track police case numbers, which gave users more options for accurately tracking insurance claims. It wasn’t hard to accomplish this change, he says.

Finally, DXC provides hosting support for Insurance RISKMASTER, which provides the city with a viable disaster recovery option and makes upgrading the system easier. These benefits, taken together, create a reliable and consistent system that allows the City of Tallahassee to successfully manage risk and claims.