Should I turn on Insurance Datafeeds?

Each individual practice should decide which, if any, insurance datafeeds to turn on based on which providers they use and how much detailed information they require.

When making this decision, you should consider the below:

The following information relates to all risk datafeeds:

• Where insurance has been manually entered into XPLAN and a risk datafeed is subsequently turned on – if auto match is turned on, the datafed policy will match with the existing manually entered policy if the Policy Number, Adviser Name and Underwriter are an exact match. Where a match is made, the datafeed will overwrite data in all fields with the exception of the Adviser Comments fields. 
• On an ongoing basis, insurance datafeeds will overwrite all fields (with the exception of the Revenue Comments and Adviser Comments fields) including those for which the feed does not supply data - in these cases, the field will be set back to blank. As such, advisers should restrict manual entries to the Revenue Comments and Adviser Comments fields only.

Based on the above, if an insurance provider does not provide enough information (such as a provider not providing the 'Waiting Period' for Income Protection cover) and the adviser manually enters the waiting period, the datafeed will delete the waiting period and reset it to blank the next time that it updates.

IRESS's Datafeed Provider Summary sheets will show you exactly what information is provided by each insurance provider to help you make the decision on whether enough information will come through on the datafeed (http://support.iress.com.au/datafeeds/PlatformDatafeeds.html)

What do other practices do?

In our experience, practices with a strong risk focus prefer to manually maintain insurance policy data in XPLAN so they can include alot more detail per policy then what is provided via datafeed.

If a practice has no insurance data in XPLAN at all, it can be useful to turn on a n insurance datafeed to initially populate insurance information, then turn off the automatic datafeed and manually maintain existing and new policy information moving forward.

Still not sure?

If you are still not sure whether you should turn on an insurance datafeed submit a request or contact our support team to talk through your questions around your specific circumstances.