The Industrial Commission of Arizona (ICA) administers and enforces state laws relating to the protection of life, health, safety, and welfare of Arizona’s employees. This includes laws relating to workers’ compensation, occupational safety and health, payment of wages, and child labor.
The ICA’s IT team, which is responsible for the agency’s technology, is focused on modernizing applications for three core business divisions: Claims, Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), and Legal. Stakeholders who will benefit from the innovations range from executive management, division managers, end-user staff, as well as external customer such as insurance carriers, employers, attorneys, and injured workers. A guiding principle for the modernization initiative is to enhance stakeholder experience through integrated architecture and user-friendly interfaces.
Today, with the help of MuleSoft and Salesforce, the ICA is ready to eliminate paper processes through the decommissioning of agency mainframe legacy systems and move away from many manual processes that currently exist.
The Challenge:
The ICA’s core legacy systems were built almost 30 years ago with minimal integrations. One of the agency’s challenges is processing large amounts of paper, as the ICA can receive 10,000 documents per week. Currently, these documents are scanned and only a few data elements are entered into the legacy systems through a manual data entry process. The ICA’s legacy systems and processes are difficult to scale to meet business demands.
The ICA’s core legacy systems include minimal integrations with other agency systems. The ICA works with a large number of insurance carriers and self-insured employers as part of the workers’ compensation claims process. To communicate with interested parties in these matters, ICA staff largely process and send hard-copy documents by U.S. Mail. Some of the claims processes require up to seven manual steps to process a single document, an inefficiency the ICA wants to remedy.
The Solution:
The ICA selected Arizona-based MST solutions as its modernization partner based on MST’s experience with enterprise integrations, customer relationship management, and cloud solutions.
After a detailed analysis of the ICA’s vision and needs, MST and the ICA decided to use MuleSoft as the integration platform and Salesforce for automating the workflows to provide maximum value to the agency and stakeholders.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform was leveraged to automate and modernize the system landscape through robust API-led integrations with other systems by eliminating manual processes and paper. Salesforce Service Cloud was leveraged to automate claims intake, workflows, tasks, and outbound notifications to interested parties, including insurance carriers, employers, and claimants. The Salesforce community portal was leveraged for claimants, employers, carriers, and attorneys to submit electronic forms, request access to claims and ALJ files, file documents to a claim, and view documents through an easy-to-access web portal.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform played a key role in unlocking data from silos and migrating data into an application network through REST APIs (Experience, Process and System APIs and scheduled mule flow) for seamless information flow between various systems and Salesforce. MST developed a generic Inbound and Outbound delivery framework on top of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform to address the intake and delivery of messages/events via different protocols (API, SFTP, FAX) through a configuration for accommodating different external parties.
A generic document streaming API framework was implemented for generating, storing, viewing, merging, and zipping documents through a common interface, thereby eliminating the manual maintenance of documents. In addition, a data transfer flow was built to automate and accommodate the high volume of non-relational data to transfer between Salesforce and other systems.
Today, with the help of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, the ICA is looking forward to being able to reduce the manual processing and achieve the following benefits:
- Support for automatic receipt of documents by stamping with received date and time.
- Ability to read/save/update/merge/zip documents in a document management system through APIs and create records in Salesforce.
- Hearings for ALJ room assignments are automated based on availability, the location of the hearing, and the location of hearing rooms.
- Inbound communication is enabled through various channels like SFTP, Mail, Fax, and API.
- Automated printing solution using through APIs for Pitney Bowes printers/sorters with complex logic to handle weekends, holidays, and mailroom hours.
- Automated upload of NCCI Proof of Coverage file into Salesforce.
- Capability to capture more data elements to support improved reporting on workplace accidents data and intelligent task routing.
Overall, the ICA and MST have moved in agile fashion by leveraging the flexibility of MuleSoft and Salesforce platforms to implement and modernize a variety of key features. Based on user feedback, MST has also been able to quickly make changes to the implementation given the flexibility in the platforms.
