Locally and centrally managed contacts
When you create a new contact, depending on what kind of contact it is, the contact can be stored in two ways. ClaimCenter can store the contact locally only in ClaimCenter. Or, ClaimCenter can store the contact locally in ClaimCenter and centrally in ContactManager and link the contacts. If you create a new, non-vendor contact directly on a claim, ClaimCenter can store it locally and not in ContactManager. This contact, associated only with the claim, is an unlinked contact.
Unlinked contacts are not associated with ContactManager. For an unlinked contact, ClaimCenter does not attempt to determine if a contact associated with one claim appears elsewhere on another claim. Thus, any unlinked contact can be a duplicate of one or more other unlinked contacts associated with different claims. When such duplicates exist, changes to one contact do not propagate to another because they are not related to one another.
Conversely, contacts stored in ContactManager, such as vendor contacts, do propagate changes when stored in ClaimCenter. In ClaimCenter, you can associate a single, centrally-managed contact with any number of claims. ClaimCenter makes a copy of each contact and stores it locally with the claim, and each copy is also linked to the ContactManager contact. Therefore, ClaimCenter can keep the data for all these copies of a contact in sync, even though there are multiple copies stored in ClaimCenter.
You can add a new contact and make the contact centrally managed and available for use with other claims. If the new contact is a vendor, it is sent automatically to ContactManager and does not require any other action in ClaimCenter to become linked.
For example, from a contact management perspective, a claimant might be a contact that other adjusters do not reuse. Therefore, a claimant might be an unlinked contact, stored locally with the claim but not in ContactManager. Even so, you could add a linked, centrally managed claimant to a claim. For example, you could click Add an Existing Contact and find the contact in ContactManager database and then add that contact to the claim.
To link a contact, ClaimCenter and ContactManager define a connection between a specific record in the ClaimCenter database and another record in the ContactManager database. In effect, linking the two contacts declares that though they are in two different databases, they are the same and are to show the same information. Users of ClaimCenter can link contacts from ClaimCenter to ContactManager. ClaimCenter can also automatically link a vendor contact to ContactManager. From ContactManager, users cannot link contacts to ClaimCenter.
After a contact is linked, the contact can be updated from either application, and both applications can get the update. ContactManager notifies ClaimCenter of changes to linked contacts. A linked contact in ClaimCenter whose data has changed in ContactManager is marked as not in sync. To keep contacts in ClaimCenter current, you can copy the data for a linked contact from ContactManager. Copying causes ClaimCenter to copy the latest information from the ContactManager central repository and mark the contact as in sync.
When you update a contact in ClaimCenter that is linked to ContactManager, ClaimCenter sends the change to ContactManager. For example, you can edit a linked contact on the Contacts screen of a claim and then update the contact. If you have permission to edit ContactManager contacts, ClaimCenter instructs ContactManager to save the change. If you do not have this permission, ClaimCenter instructs ContactManager to create a pending change, which then has to be reviewed by a ContactManager user.
You can unlink a contact. An unlinked contact in ClaimCenter becomes a claim-specific contact and is no longer centrally managed. However, even though the contact is no longer linked to ContactManager, a contact that you unlink continues to be in the ContactManager database.
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