Underwriting Predictive Modeling, Building Consumer Trust, And Keeping Policyholders Healthy
I always like April’s article to include underwriting because the largest life insurance underwriting conference, AHOU, which is April 16-19 this year in Hollywood, FL. I met with Samplemed about predictive modeling for underwriting. As life insurance becomes more digitized, trust and fraud become very real, so I reached out to TransUnion. Wellness—engaging policyholders—is also covered in this article as I contacted Medix Global about their mobile app and medical services. It’s a growing trend way beyond wellness but taking it to the next level including medical prevention and early detection. All three of these topics do have an ultimate connection to underwriting and claims as AI, identity fraud protection, and the use of health IOT data are trending.
Building Trust with Consumers when Digitizing the Life Insurance Process
Digitalization continues to be an important trend in life insurance, although this sector of the industry is traditionally more conservative and has lagged behind personal lines in adopting new technology and channels. Traditionally, 90 percent or more of life insurance policies have been purchased through insurance agents, but the TransUnion Annual Insurance Outlook Survey reveals that that has truly changed in 2023: 40 percent of respondents who shopped for life insurance did so online or via app, and that holds across generations.
With this increase in digitalization, the ability to secure trust across channels and deliver seamless experiences for consumers via improved identity and fraud products is critical. TransUnion orchestrates proprietary personal identifiable information (PII), device information and behavioral insights to make trust possible between businesses and consumers. This has several potential benefits:
- Improve customer conversion: Increase return on customer acquisition programs, reduce abandonment and grow revenue.
- Reduce fraud losses: Mitigate risk and secure trust at every stage of the consumer lifecycle—reducing operational costs, false positives, and manual reviews.
- Enhance consumer satisfaction: Seamless experiences are fast, easy, safe and secure, allowing you to exceed consumer expectations and increase loyalty with a friction-right process.
Carriers can also extend this trust process with improved communications and enhanced outreach while streamlining call center or agent outbound operations. With the right solution, you can make every touchpoint count through authoritative identity information and phone number authentication. You will enable trusted communications and reduce the possibility of your calls being identified as “spam” by adding your brand and verifying your identity on legitimate outbound calls. You can also block fraudulent calls (spoofed numbers from fraudsters) from being displayed to your customers. Call center efficiencies allow you to streamline connectivity for a better customer experience while also improving agent productivity. TransUnion’s solution has deep integration with phone companies to power greater reach across the telecom ecosystem. This was proved out by an Omdia (2021) survey that showed customers using TransUnion’s TruContact branded communications saw a 90-100 percent decrease in spam complaints. Overall, having a unified and comprehensive suite of identity and communications solutions will improve consumer trust and strengthen the business relationship. To learn more about TransUnion solutions for life insurance visit https://www.transunion.com/industry/insurance/life-insurance.
Demystifying Predictive Models for Life Underwriting
In days of AI and ChatGPT, more stable markets such as ours—the life insurance market—question themselves whether technology can really predict medical fraud and claims, or should it all be just considered a trend to areas which may be less impacted by bias like marketing or sales teams.
There is a lot of data out there on consumer behavior. It is known that, due to data privacy protection and unstructured data, health statistics remain in a black box. Without accurate structured health data, no model can be made with trustable accuracy.
No one has that data except medical providers. For this reason, I would ask you to pay particular attention to the new set of Predictive Models launched by Samplemed. With over 35+ years of underwriting, more than 500k recorded tele-interviews, thousands of medical reports collected, and a double of automated underwriting cases, they do have privileged anonymized data that no else in the market has. With its mass of specific life policyholder underwriting data and raw interviews, it unveiled in the market their own line of Predictive Models with individual scores for benefits: Death, Accidental Death, Disability due to Accident or Illness, Critical Illness, and Surgical Risks.
Their Life Predictive Model belongs to the category of supervised classification models. The choice of the model’s covariates is based on market and underwriting choice of the client, ensuring that each company will receive a unique model adapted to its own portfolio. The predictive models are available with all other features you need for underwriting life at Samplemed’s newest platform, the S.360. Used by reinsurers and insurers around the globe, it can perform automated underwriting, video-interviews, tele-interviews, accelerated underwriting, request lab exams, and consult underwriting manuals in a single flow of cases. All in a user friendly and data smart way.
All cases will be tagged down with Samplemed’s own rich self-developed risks taxonomy, the new life insurance ICD, which will ensure that no medical data will remain unstructured and unused.
In this way, a natural product of the use of the platform is the company’s own private Life Data Lake, where all medical data from all applicants remain structured and anonymized at the reach of data science department or business analysts. It is a platform to ensure deeper insights and give you the base to produce, with Samplemed, your own new predictive models. Find out more about Samplemed’s Life predictive modeling at https://en.samplemed.com.br/underwritingsolutions.
Leveraging Technology to Keep Policyholders Healthy
In 2006, Sigal Atzmon founded Medix with a mission to improve the way healthcare is provided globally, with a focus on the accessibility, implementation, and sustainability of quality care. A leading provider of innovative, high quality health management solutions, Medix has since expanded to serve close to nine million customers across 90+ countries with offices in New York, London, Munich, Hong Kong, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Tel Aviv. Medix delivers personalized and data-driven health responses using a range of digital health tools, 300+ in-house doctors and nurses, and a global quality accredited network of 4,500+ specialists and 2,000+ hospitals for expert consultation.
Acting as the essential hub of the health journey, Medix delivers impactful responses combining the best digital tools with real human presence for any health need throughout life, including medical prevention and diagnostics, medical management and navigation, rehabilitation, mental health, and telehealth. All services are accessible via the Medix app—a personal, holistic, one-stop medical command center that puts patients at the helm of their unique health journey. The Medix App unlocks new insights and actions by gaining a deeper understanding of your full medical profile—from proprietary health assessments to record scanning and filing to lab trends to real-time doctor consultations—and connecting it all with unique algorithms and medical data sets built over two decades.
It is important to recognize a more holistic approach to healthcare that invests in prevention, so people stay healthier for longer. Wellness and lifestyle recommendations are an important start, but it is essential to go one step further and offer personalized clinically focused interventions. Medix formulates personalized health plans based on a user’s family history, genetics, screenings, and detailed health assessments. Fifty-three percent of users who have gone through the prevention service avoided or reduced unnecessary screenings and 28 percent indicated a medium to high risk to develop a (new/previously unknown) metabolic syndrome condition.
Telemedicine and digital tools, combined with a human touch, can empower individuals to take ownership over their long term health, but can also increase accessibility to quality care and reduce costs. Utilizing medical management and navigation services helps manage costs by providing patients with streamlined, coordinated care. Medix users have achieved better medical outcomes through 360-degree multidisciplinary case management and navigation. Twenty percent of cases have resulted in a change of diagnosis, 43 percent have resulted in a change in treatment plan, and in 18 percent of cases costly unnecessary major treatments and procedures have been avoided.
By offering multidisciplinary continuity of care around the clock, Medix optimizes clinical pathways and reduces costs while also offering ongoing assessment tools that reduce claims and risks to health over the long term. Medix has demonstrably raised standards, optimized care, and improved outcomes worldwide. On average globally Medix is saving close to $6,000 USD per case managed. You can get more information on medical prevention and early detection by visiting https://medix-global.com/.