(Image source: IIR.)
Applied Systems’ expansion of its Employee Navigator integration addresses one of the most persistent inefficiencies in employee benefits: entering the same plan information repeatedly as it moves among quoting, agency management and enrollment systems.
The newly expanded integration lets brokers transfer finalized benefits plan data directly from Applied Epic to Employee Navigator. Combined with Applied’s AI-powered document extraction capabilities, the integration can take information from plan documents, convert it into structured data within Epic and pass it to Employee Navigator for enrollment.
The development is more than an improvement to an existing connection, according to Tammi Shapiro, SVP and General Manager, Benefits Solutions, Applied Systems (Chicago). It represents a step toward Applied’s broader vision of Epic as the connective center of an agency’s benefits operations—even when agencies use multiple quoting platforms, benefits-administration systems and other specialized technologies.
Tammi Shapiro, SVP, General Manager, Benefits Solutions, Applied Systems.
Applied previously connected Employee Navigator (Bethesda, Md.) with Applied Benefit Designer, its benefits quoting platform. The new integration originates in Epic, allowing plan information from a wider variety of sources to be consolidated there before being transferred to Employee Navigator.
“We know there are a lot of ways that agencies are doing renewals and a lot of systems that they’re using,” Shapiro says. “The benefit of having the integration from Epic is that, if you’re using different quoting platforms—which we know many of our customers do—we can centralize all of that information in Epic and then push it to Employee Navigator for enrollment.”
From Plan Documents to Enrollment
The workflow begins after an agency has finalized the plans selected by an employer. Those might include medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, life, short-term disability and long-term disability plans.
Within Epic, the broker can activate an AI-powered capability called Epic AutoFill and attach the relevant plan document. AutoFill extracts the plan provisions and presents them to the user for review. Once the agency has validated the information, it becomes a structured plan record in Epic that can be sent to Employee Navigator.
The process retains a deliberate human-review stage. AutoFill assigns confidence levels to extracted fields, flags information that may warrant additional attention and points the user to the location in the source document from which the information was taken. The user can review or correct the results before approving the plan data.
“The tool itself will flag, based on confidence, the fields that it thinks you should look at,” Shapiro says. “It will tell you which ones it has very high confidence in, and it will point to where in the document the information came from.”
That changes the nature of the work rather than removing human responsibility for it. Instead of locating, interpreting and typing every field, the benefits professional reviews the AI’s output and concentrates on exceptions.
Applied measures AutoFill accuracy at the individual field or value level, based on how many extracted values users correct or reject. Shapiro described current accuracy as being in the “high 90 percent” range. Applied has established a minimum accuracy target of 90 percent across all supported plan types, though performance can vary by type. When a particular document schema falls below that threshold, the company reviews and adjusts it to restore accuracy to at least 90 percent.
Applied began AutoFill with Summary of Benefits and Coverage forms for medical plans and has progressively added other benefit types. The categories it currently supports account for approximately 80 percent of the group-benefits plans recorded in Epic.
The amount of labor involved in processing even one plan can be considerable. A Summary of Benefits and Coverage document may run 10 to 15 pages and contain more than 100 fields that must be located and entered. Some provisions must also be interpreted and normalized. A document might state, for example, that the plan covers 80 percent of a service, while the agency system expresses the same provision as a 20 percent member obligation.
“There’s a lot of time spent not just typing, but finding and interpreting the information,” Shapiro says. “That can be removed from this process.”
Early users have told Applied that tasks that previously required 10 to 15 minutes can now be completed in a few minutes, according to Shapiro. The integration then eliminates another round of manual entry by moving the validated data from Epic to Employee Navigator.
Connecting a Diverse Ecosystem
The ideal quote-to-enroll process may appear linear: obtain quotes, finalize a plan, record it in the agency management system and send it to the enrollment platform. In practice, Shapiro says, benefits operations are rarely so uniform.
Different offices within the same agency may use different quoting platforms. Some employees may rely heavily on email rather than a dedicated quoting system. An agency may use Employee Navigator for many employer clients while supporting other benefits-administration platforms for others. Certain benefits may be quoted digitally, while voluntary products continue to be handled through email and documents.
Even when agencies have adopted the necessary systems, their employees may not use them consistently.
“There are still a lot of email-based processes,” Shapiro says. “You might quote dental, medical and vision on a quoting platform, and then handle other voluntary benefits through email.”
Applied’s strategy is not to eliminate every specialized platform or require agencies to conduct the entire process with proprietary Applied technology. The company offers Benefit Designer, but it is also extending Epic’s APIs and developing a certification program through which other technology providers can build broader integrations.
Applied does not offer its own benefits-administration platform. Employee Navigator therefore occupies a critical place in the ecosystem Applied is assembling around Epic.
“While it’s not all on a single platform, our vision is to enable connectivity across those platforms so that the workflows and the data flow seamlessly,” Shapiro says. “Users shouldn’t have to update, retype and rekey information in order to have the systems do what they do best.”
In that model, Epic serves as the central agency environment in which information from quoting tools, carrier and plan documents, email-based exchanges and enrollment systems can be viewed and managed.
Applied’s Epic Bridge provides another connection point by synchronizing information from Microsoft Outlook with Epic. A broker receiving a plan document through email can bring it into Epic, process it through AutoFill and ultimately transfer its data to Employee Navigator.
The objective is not merely technical connectivity, but continuity across a workflow whose participants may retain considerable freedom in their choice of tools.
Completing the Return Journey
The capability announced by Applied currently moves plan information in one direction—from Epic to Employee Navigator. The next stage will use newer Employee Navigator APIs to bring information in the opposite direction.
Applied is working to return plan changes, documents and enrollment information from Employee Navigator to Epic. Enrollment counts are particularly important because they can affect the commissions agencies expect under PEPM, or per-employee-per-month, arrangements. Bringing those figures into Epic could support more accurate commission forecasting and reconciliation.
“Employee Navigator has enrollment information, and that feeds into how much commission an agency should receive,” Shapiro explains. “We’re doing work now to bring some of that most relevant information into Epic and create that bidirectional data movement.”
Determining the authoritative source will depend on the data element. Employee Navigator would naturally be the source of truth for enrollment counts, Shapiro says. Other discrepancies—such as differences in an account name or plan information—may need to be presented to users for reconciliation.
Such conflicts reflect the complexity of actual agency workflows. A broker might finalize a plan in a quoting platform, transfer it to Epic and then discover that a coverage must be added. Agencies are not consistent about whether the employee updates the quoting system and resends the information or changes the Epic record directly. Without bidirectional connectivity, one system can remain out of date.
Applied’s developing approach is to expose those differences, allow the agency to resolve them and keep Epic as current as possible.
A Broader Benefits Strategy
Applied has historically been associated more strongly with P&C agency technology, but Shapiro says the company has invested heavily in employee benefits over the past several years. In 2025, it introduced a new benefits experience within Epic intended to provide an environment optimized for benefits teams. That experience is a prerequisite for the Employee Navigator integration and AutoFill.
The expanded integration is now generally available to mutual Applied Epic and Employee Navigator customers using the new benefits experience. Applied reports that the Employee Navigator integration carries no additional fee, and Shapiro says agencies can be enabled within hours or days.
Applied believes its established presence in agency management gives it an opportunity to support benefits and P&C on a common technology foundation. The lines retain different terminology, data and specialized processes, but Shapiro sees substantial overlap in areas such as accounting, renewals, document ingestion, plan or policy checking and commission reconciliation.
A common platform can also give an agency a more complete view of clients that buy both commercial insurance and employee benefits, while reducing the number of systems on which employees must be trained.
Applied has already applied some of the same automation concepts across lines. Applied Recon reads carrier commission statements, extracts their information and maps it into Epic for reconciliation. AutoFill began with benefits documents, but Applied is extending the underlying approach to other lines of business.
“There are a number of workflows that have a lot of commonality,” Shapiro says. “The data and the nomenclature tend to vary, but we can use many of the same frameworks.”
From Administration to Advice
The immediate benefit of the Employee Navigator integration is operational: less searching, interpretation, typing and movement between systems. The larger business benefit may lie in what agencies do with the capacity they recover.
Employers are confronting continuing healthcare cost increases while expanding their benefit offerings to attract and retain employees. Shapiro argues that they increasingly need brokers to advise them on plan design, contribution strategies, workforce demographics and how their offerings compare with those of peer organizations.
Automating plan administration gives brokers more time for that work.
The resulting value should also extend beyond the agency. More accurate plan information can reduce enrollment problems for employers and their employees, while faster processing can improve implementation and service. Realizing those benefits, however, will require agencies to address change management as well as technology.
Even an easier process must be adopted consistently. Employees accustomed to email or manual methods must be shown the new workflow, and agencies must establish expectations about which systems their teams should use. Applied is supporting that transition with in-product guidance and other training materials, but Shapiro acknowledges that agencies themselves must motivate behavioral change.
One incentive is that structured data can produce benefits beyond the Employee Navigator transfer. Agencies can use it to generate enrollment guides, support analytics and create other client materials.
Extending Benefits Automation
Applied’s roadmap extends beyond bidirectional Employee Navigator connectivity. The company is developing a plan-checking capability that would compare a newly received plan with the existing plan in Epic and flag differences before the information is sent for enrollment.
Applied is also exploring side-by-side plan comparison, the extraction of rates and commission agreements, more automated creation of enrollment guides and broker-compensation disclosures, and greater intelligence around commission anomalies.
These capabilities build on the same underlying premise as AutoFill: information trapped in documents or isolated systems becomes more useful once it has been converted into structured, connected data.
The Employee Navigator enhancement supplies one important link in that strategy. Its longer-term significance will depend on Applied’s ability to complete the return flow, reconcile differences among systems and persuade agencies to adopt more consistent workflows.
The technological objective is increasingly within reach. The more difficult task may be making a connected process work across the untidy variety of platforms, offices and individual practices that define benefits distribution today.