Digitize Form

Context/The Situation

Workers’ compensation claims at our company begin with a First Report of Injury — a form with over 80 fields, historically filled out by hand and submitted by mail, fax, or file upload. On the receiving end, staff would manually parse each submission and re-enter the data into internal systems before a claim could move forward. The friction was real on both sides. Submitters — employers, injured workers, and insurance agents — had no way to attach supporting documents or save their progress. Staff dealt with handwriting that was hard to read, missing fields that required follow-up, and a data re-entry burden that slowed every claim before it even started.

Challenge/What Made It Hard

The form serves three distinct submitter types, each with different required fields. On top of that, a web of conditional logic determines what’s shown or required based on how earlier fields are answered. Getting that logic right meant thinking carefully about the user’s path at every step — not just the data model underneath. And the output couldn’t just be close to the original form: the generated PDF had to exactly match the layout of the paper document, which required building a custom template in ActiveReports rather than reaching for anything simpler.

Solution/What I Did

I worked closely with a business analyst from the start — asking questions, surfacing edge cases, and making sure I understood the business before writing any code. Without a dedicated QA role on the team, I owned testing end to end as well. The form itself is multi-step, breaking 80+ fields into sections that guide the user through without overwhelming them. Conditional logic controls which fields appear and which are required, based on both the submitter’s role and their answers to earlier questions. Structured validation runs throughout to catch incomplete or inconsistent data before submission. On the backend, submitting the form triggers a PDF generated from a custom ActiveReports template I designed to match the original paper form exactly. That PDF routes directly into our document ingestion system, which kicks off the internal claims workflow automatically — no manual re-entry involved. Logged-in policyholders can also save their progress and return later, which was a specific request from business stakeholders that turned out to matter a lot in practice. I demoed the completed form to business stakeholders before go-live, and the reception was strong.

Outcome/Impact

The form launched with roughly 1,600 submissions in its first year and has since grown to 8,000+ annually. Submissions arrive legible, complete, and structured — staff no longer chase down missing information or manually key data into internal systems, and claims move into processing workflows faster from day one.