April 30, 2013 at 12:44unadox.com: hello to insurers
Hello, dear habrayuzer!
We’re in a hurry to promote and, of course, get a portion of tips and feedback from you, just launching a beta of our service. As they say: fresh, not familiar with the Corporation and its search engine sufficiently. Our service is dedicated to online claims management, as well as related workflow.
Interested - request under the cat…
The market for insurance services is very different from the Russian, and indeed the entire CIS. Medical services, life insurance, car, property, real estate, liability to third parties, and much more. Including the annual tax return, possible tax deductions - everything is different here, and everyone considers his own penny. Such a culture. For example, health insurance is compulsory in most countries and can make up about 10-15% of the monthly (!) Family income.
Ordinary mortals, users of these services have to rake up a bunch of invoices for payment and pieces of paper still arriving by regular mail (good, it works quickly and clearly), pay, send to the insurance, demanding reimbursement.
Most keep copies or originals of invoices, and over the course of a couple of years a decent pile of documents are accumulated that may be needed sometime (but more often not) and clutter up living space above the above-mentioned mere mortal.
Persons who are not pedantic in collecting and storing documents can lose their hard-earned money by first paying the bill from their own pockets, then forgetting to send it to the insurance company for compensation ... If you remember, you will have to apply for a copy of the copy, but not remember - no one will will remind.
Although, how sad it is to lose the original bill from the dentist for 1000 euros and not receive the hundreds of euros due to compensation. In this case, our friend will have to apply for a copy and so on. After which he begins to store decisively all the documents arriving by mail.
And we will not even touch on the topic of organizing, filtering and sorting these documents, an ordinary, not very sick family of 3-4 people ...
Another problem, possibly facing the user of insurance services and, of course, an honest taxpayer, is a possible tax refund (part of it). The fact is that at a cost of more than a certain amount per year, the taxpayer has the right to a tax deduction. But then the question arises - how to track all payments for the year (go over all archived pieces of paper) and decide what to write in the tax return?
To solve these two and many other problems, the unadox online service was invented .
It is very important for us to receive feedback from the audience of Habr, who happened to live outside the CIS, who are familiar with the problem firsthand and could evaluate the service we offer in relation to their case.
The use of the service should be minimized by the user’s already burdened routine associated with this issue. The principle and idea are very simple. Today, most users (willing to entrust their documents to the “cloud”) have a mobile phone (more likely even a smartphone) with support for mail and a camera that replaces the scanner. The user photographs the received document (or several) and sends it to a special email address of our service. Having received a letter from a registered user, we save information from the received message, create a claim (claim), visible only in the user's account. We inform him of the successful registration of the application by email.
Naturally, the user can do exactly the same actions from the screen of his PC, logging in with his account.
The following functionality is also available:
Of course, our system is suitable for almost any type of insurance application, not necessarily medical. We assume that it can also be useful for insurance brokers who conduct business for their clients.
At the moment, the main user interface language is English, but in the near future we will connect the most popular European languages, such as German, French and Italian, and after that Spanish with Portuguese and others.
Conducting expensive marketing research on the subject of “whether the idea works” means and there was absolutely no time. In time, a book came to hand, repeatedly sung by hawkers: Re-Work from 37 signals, and it started ...
Our lead developer recommended using Django to implement the service and programming most of the business logic in Python. Our technical kitchen is described below - deploy if interested.
There are 3 people in our team today: developer, tester and project manager. Depending on the tasks, each of us is able to perform other functions. We attracted third-party artists and designers and are very pleased that we have our own beautiful logo and artwork (examples in the article).
The development process can not be attributed to either XP or Agile - we are too small to limit ourselves to such a framework. Nevertheless, we regularly organize intensive sessions (conference calls), where we actively solve problems requiring collaboration. Tasks are grouped by iterations that last 1 month. After testing, we jointly close tasks, identify new ones and discuss existing problems and ways to solve them. Such “subbotniks” help us to progress and coordinate our efforts for the next spurt.
... this is our kitchen ... The
functionality of the system will be constantly expanding, but the cost of the service will remain equal to the price of a Coke bottle - the amount that everyone can afford.
You can follow the project news on our blog or subscribe to twitter , and if you register now while we work in public beta, you will get the opportunity to use our service completely free for a year.
We will be glad to have a detailed reasoned discussion. This is the first attempt to write for habr, so do not judge strictly, but rather give good advice.
The opinions of security enthusiasts are also important to us. Dear colleagues, if you find any problems - write in a personal. We will be very grateful, ready for cooperation.
NB While this article was being prepared, it turned out that the insurance company “forgot” to compensate the author for payments made more than one month ago.
We’re in a hurry to promote and, of course, get a portion of tips and feedback from you, just launching a beta of our service. As they say: fresh, not familiar with the Corporation and its search engine sufficiently. Our service is dedicated to online claims management, as well as related workflow.
Interested - request under the cat…
About insurance in Europe and in the West. Problem
The market for insurance services is very different from the Russian, and indeed the entire CIS. Medical services, life insurance, car, property, real estate, liability to third parties, and much more. Including the annual tax return, possible tax deductions - everything is different here, and everyone considers his own penny. Such a culture. For example, health insurance is compulsory in most countries and can make up about 10-15% of the monthly (!) Family income.
Ordinary mortals, users of these services have to rake up a bunch of invoices for payment and pieces of paper still arriving by regular mail (good, it works quickly and clearly), pay, send to the insurance, demanding reimbursement.
Most keep copies or originals of invoices, and over the course of a couple of years a decent pile of documents are accumulated that may be needed sometime (but more often not) and clutter up living space above the above-mentioned mere mortal.
Persons who are not pedantic in collecting and storing documents can lose their hard-earned money by first paying the bill from their own pockets, then forgetting to send it to the insurance company for compensation ... If you remember, you will have to apply for a copy of the copy, but not remember - no one will will remind.
Although, how sad it is to lose the original bill from the dentist for 1000 euros and not receive the hundreds of euros due to compensation. In this case, our friend will have to apply for a copy and so on. After which he begins to store decisively all the documents arriving by mail.
And we will not even touch on the topic of organizing, filtering and sorting these documents, an ordinary, not very sick family of 3-4 people ...
Another problem, possibly facing the user of insurance services and, of course, an honest taxpayer, is a possible tax refund (part of it). The fact is that at a cost of more than a certain amount per year, the taxpayer has the right to a tax deduction. But then the question arises - how to track all payments for the year (go over all archived pieces of paper) and decide what to write in the tax return?
To solve these two and many other problems, the unadox online service was invented .
It is very important for us to receive feedback from the audience of Habr, who happened to live outside the CIS, who are familiar with the problem firsthand and could evaluate the service we offer in relation to their case.
Service Description
The use of the service should be minimized by the user’s already burdened routine associated with this issue. The principle and idea are very simple. Today, most users (willing to entrust their documents to the “cloud”) have a mobile phone (more likely even a smartphone) with support for mail and a camera that replaces the scanner. The user photographs the received document (or several) and sends it to a special email address of our service. Having received a letter from a registered user, we save information from the received message, create a claim (claim), visible only in the user's account. We inform him of the successful registration of the application by email.
Naturally, the user can do exactly the same actions from the screen of his PC, logging in with his account.
The following functionality is also available:
- Analysis of costs and compensation received
- Organization and filtering of the list of applications (claims)
- Editing applications, their status and data on costs / payments, commenting on applications
application life cycle in detail
An application created through mail or a web interface begins to live its own life. And you can say goodbye to a heap of pieces of paper. Send them, as you usually do, to your insurance company and wait for payment. Meanwhile, 30 days begin to count (by default and customizable), after which the system will remind the user that he has an open application. It should be noted that 30 days is the standard term for paying bills in Europe. In this simple way, we remind the user that maybe he should react, contact the insurance company and find out why the payment is delayed: maybe the documents are missing or (oh, horror!) They were lost. In this case, all that the user needs to do is send again a copy of the document stored in the application.
Of course, our system is suitable for almost any type of insurance application, not necessarily medical. We assume that it can also be useful for insurance brokers who conduct business for their clients.
At the moment, the main user interface language is English, but in the near future we will connect the most popular European languages, such as German, French and Italian, and after that Spanish with Portuguese and others.
Read “Rework” - and forward
Conducting expensive marketing research on the subject of “whether the idea works” means and there was absolutely no time. In time, a book came to hand, repeatedly sung by hawkers: Re-Work from 37 signals, and it started ...
Our lead developer recommended using Django to implement the service and programming most of the business logic in Python. Our technical kitchen is described below - deploy if interested.
some kitchen for those interested
- Project, task management tool - Trello. We use the Extreme Programming framework for planning (and some other methodologies): User Stories and Engineering Tasks.
- Code management, wiki, bug tracking - bitbucket.org
- Box.com has become our “box” for documents.
- The servers are running Ubuntu 12 LTS. Hosted in their own cloud, as well as in the Amazon AWS cloud. To test the system, the free version of EC2 was enough, we pay a little extra for traffic with snapshots.
There are 3 people in our team today: developer, tester and project manager. Depending on the tasks, each of us is able to perform other functions. We attracted third-party artists and designers and are very pleased that we have our own beautiful logo and artwork (examples in the article).
The development process can not be attributed to either XP or Agile - we are too small to limit ourselves to such a framework. Nevertheless, we regularly organize intensive sessions (conference calls), where we actively solve problems requiring collaboration. Tasks are grouped by iterations that last 1 month. After testing, we jointly close tasks, identify new ones and discuss existing problems and ways to solve them. Such “subbotniks” help us to progress and coordinate our efforts for the next spurt.
... this is our kitchen ... The
functionality of the system will be constantly expanding, but the cost of the service will remain equal to the price of a Coke bottle - the amount that everyone can afford.
You can follow the project news on our blog or subscribe to twitter , and if you register now while we work in public beta, you will get the opportunity to use our service completely free for a year.
We will be glad to have a detailed reasoned discussion. This is the first attempt to write for habr, so do not judge strictly, but rather give good advice.
The opinions of security enthusiasts are also important to us. Dear colleagues, if you find any problems - write in a personal. We will be very grateful, ready for cooperation.
NB While this article was being prepared, it turned out that the insurance company “forgot” to compensate the author for payments made more than one month ago.