Midlands Claim Administrators provides claim processing services to insurance companies and companies who are self insured. Midlands adjustors process claims on behalf of their clients. Office personnel manage disbursements and reporting.

As a pioneer in their industry, Midlands Claim Administrators has doubled in size annually for the last 4 years. As of the commencement of the project, Midlands staff numbered over 75 employees.

High Plains Digital (dba The Austin Consultant Group) had been providing network consulting and support to the Midland companies for several years. This experience would prove useful in addressing Midlands development needs.

Midlands was utilizing aging claim management and Lossrun tracking applications both of which had been written in Clarion under DOS. These systems were problematic, difficult to support and were not scaling well to match Midlands growth. The two applications each handled a portion of the overall claim processing and were not well integrated leading to double entry of certain information and other operational difficulties. Midlands needed to add new features and improve overall system performance and scalability. The DOS Clarion platform was not up to the task.

High Plains Digital (dba The Austin Consultant Group) was contracted to design and implement a new system that would better support and streamline company operations and provide a platform that would scale and be adaptable and extendable to handle future needs and growth. We performed a thorough review of the existing CSYS and Lossrun programs and engaged Midlands personnel in a full analysis of the company business functions and processes. A new system was designed that would provide the scalability and flexibility needed to keep up with Midlands Claim Administrators exceptional growth.

The new system was developed in approximately 18 months. Almost immediately, new features were requested and we began a process of expanding the system to address new business needs and further automate Midlands operations.

A critical set of new features that have been added give Midlands clients the ability to access parts of the claim system to submit information and generate reports that traditionally had to be prepared by Midlands office personnel. This allows significantly faster turnaround for the client and relieves an operational burden from Midlands staff.

B2B functionality has been added enabling the exchange of real-time claim management data and accounting information with Midlands client companies.

Integration with the Policy Master system from Syrius has been added to allow underwriters to analyze policy performance based upon claim history.

Midlands expansion has included the establishment of remote offices in Pennsylvania, Texas, and California. The efficiency and inherent security of the architecture used in development has allowed the remote offices to access all features of the system using the Internet as a low cost wide area network transport.

After several years of operation Midlands growth continues at an ever increasing rate. The new system has handled the growth in capacity and features exceeding everyone’s expectations.

The technologies and products utilized include Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server as the database/network platform with Windows XP clients. The primary claims application is written in Visual Basic utilizing a 3-tier architecture with business logic implemented as objects. Data access is controlled through SQL Server stored procedures. Web access is developed utilizing IIS/ASP programming with extensive reuse of business logic through class objects.