ACC claims management system goes to Irish firm

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Accident Compensation Corporation has turned to Dublin-based banking and insurance software specialist Fineos to build a replacement for its Pathway claims management system.

It is also about to replace its six-year-old Geac SmartStream financial system with Oracle Financials.

ACC development general manager Murray Young said 10 people from Fineos were arriving this month to start working with Unisys, ACC's IT outsourcer, on a proof of concept. This should be complete in four to six months.

Young said the Pathway replacement project was the ACC's first major investment in new systems since 1997.

It was salvaged from an earlier bespoke system development, ACCtion, which was cut short after a 1996 Audit Office investigation concluded the project was out of control and could balloon out to over $100 million if allowed to continue.

Pathway is written in C++ on a Sybase database running on a large Sun E10,000 server.

"Pathway has grown over time, which has made it harder to maintain, so we are looking at an environment which is easier to maintain and will take our business forward," Young said. "Over the past three years the business has run ahead of technology. We have achieved a lot despite our systems."

He said ACC wanted better connectivity and collaboration with health providers, so it could do more to get claimants back to work.

Fineos Front Office 4 will be used for claimant and case management. Entitlement and payments processing will be done with components of Fineos Back Office.

Apart from case management, the other major ACC systems are its bespoke medical fee system, which handles payments to providers, and its core financials.

The accounts receivable function was switched to Oracle over the past nine months, and the ACC has just closed a tender for an integrator to help with the implementation of other Oracle financial modules.

The three major systems need to be linked together.