OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and plays a part in pulling policy data from your COIs.
When you upload a COI into the system, the OCR technology within the software scans the document. The goal of the OCR is to automatically extract key information such as policy types, coverage limits, and expiration dates from the document. Once this extraction is done, the relevant policy boxes are checked at the bottom of the page, and the expiration dates are automatically filled in.
However, there are instances where the OCR may not be able to process the document successfully. This is typically the case with scanned documents, where the quality of the image might be poor, the text might be too small or unclear, or the document is distorted in some way. OCR technology works best with machine-readable text (like that in PDFs created directly from digital forms), but can struggle with handwritten or low-quality scanned text. When this happens, the OCR system might not be able to populate the policy information or expiration dates automatically.
If this occurs, don't worry! Even though the system wasn't able to extract the information automatically, you still have the ability to manually enter the required details. Simply check the appropriate policy boxes and enter the expiration dates yourself. Once you've done that, you can still submit the COI with the correct details, ensuring that the document is processed without issues.
In short, OCR is a tool to speed up the process, but if it can't read the document properly, manual entry ensures the COI submission is still complete and accurate.