We all had to adapt to change beginning nine months ago with the pandemic. A distributor’s Agency Management System (AMS) must improve its quality of service for agents/advisors, field underwriting (exams) needs to be safe, and turning Inforce data to action is critical for advisors to manage their client’s policies. Here is an inside look on how life insurance solution providers adapted and innovated to these new challenges in 2020.
Agency Management Systems Essential for Distributors during COVID
Life insurance distributors in the USA and Canada faced the same challenges during COVID in 2020. I reached out to Equisoft whose Agency Management System (AMS) is the most widely used in Canada for life insurance distributors, and it is also available in the USA. I also met with OneHQ whose modern, easy-to-use CRM/AMS gained momentum in 2020.
David Nicolai, vice president, Insurance Solutions at Equisoft explains how back office automation is essential for servicing their advisors, “How do distributors stay relevant in times of accelerated change? That’s a critical question we’ve heard distributors ask so often over the past nine months. The answer, for some, is that it has been difficult—to pivot quickly and execute on a new value proposition that will enhance their ability to attract and retain the best advisors—if they are still running their business with manual, largely paper-based processes. There’s too much drag in the system. Innovation, no matter how creative their thinking is, will be hard to implement. On the other hand, we have clients who went from 100 percent paper-based to almost entirely automated and digital when they implemented the Equisoft/centralize agency management system. That made all the difference. When COVID hit and distributor staff, advisors and clients could no longer meet in person, their transition to the new reality was almost seamless. App processing, advisor communication, inforce services—all continued at pace because they didn’t rely on paper and mail. Clients received the support they needed in difficult times. Advisors appreciated the service and value their distributors were able to provide in helping them continue to meet their clients’ needs.”
Meeting with Brett Barker, Senior Account Executive at OneHQ, he provided not only information about their AMS, but client experiences during 2020. Tailored specifically for insurance distribution, OneHQ is an extremely powerful yet easy-to-use system. It’s highly configurable, replacing disjointed systems by bringing the CRM, AMS, and Compensation together plus integrating all other systems into one place. Brett explained, “Our user-friendly interface and personalized modules help give each department a dialed-in system to maximize results. As an example, a OneHQ customer recently made the move from their legacy system to OneHQ because their back office and sales teams had very little communication between systems. Wanting more data visibility for sales and back office efficiencies, the team moved to OneHQ and for the first time in years they had access to all of the information they needed within seconds. In the end, sales activity increased 20 percent and OneHQ’s innovative platform is providing better service to agents by freeing up the back office teams from running reports and answering questions.”
With the changes brought about by COVID-19 and more focus on how technology can impact sales internally and for their agents, OneHQ has witnessed a tidal wave of new clients. Their modern technology that focuses on increasing sales without sacrificing service is giving their clients an edge during these rapidly changing times. Brett continued, stating that OneHQ is increasingly seeing more of their clients beginning to offer their agents a full technology strategy starting with the CRM that integrates with their back-office system. In addition, this also makes the IMO much “stickier” with their agents. To sum it all up, Kyle J. Ginavan, CEO, OneHQ, said, “There have always been many good technology options available to insurance agents, but never a full technology strategy. While the securities industry has well-thought-out technology strategies for financial advisors, insurance distribution has typically lagged in this area. However, with COVID, we’re certainly starting to see that change.”
Exam Safety: Simplifying through Innovation
Underwriting is key to the life insurance new business process. For term insurance, a drop ticket with an exam still dominates the higher percentage of cases in 2020. Paramed exam companies are the front lines for underwriting. I reached out to Ryan Janeway, founder and CEO of MediPro Direct. Ryan explained that at this stage of the pandemic, protecting field medical teams and applicants requires access, innovation, and adaptation. Said Janeway, “Very few companies are positioned as effectively as MediPro Direct to actually improve customer experience during this crisis. MediPro Direct founded Vanguard Genetics LLC in 2015 to gain access to clinical and genetic testing services that can aid underwriters in policy-making decisions now and into the future. Under the current circumstances, our clinical lab association has provided immediate access to necessary PPE, as well as rapid COVID antigen testing to ensure the safety of our customers and team.”
As innovators, the teams at MediPro Direct and Vanguard Genetics helped bring rapid antigen testing to market and are now validating saliva test collection methods to simplify the collection process for these tests. Additionally, their teams have reduced manufacturing costs by up to 70 percent in order to dramatically improve public access to testing—which, combined with the distribution of vaccines, are key to getting customer business and lives back on track. Under proper credentialing, these tests can be used in the office and in the field to help ensure safety during insurance exams, clinical trials, and other medical interactions. MediPro Direct has adapted to the current environment by creating unique tools and processes such as its Tier1 Network™, to increase examiner coverage for carriers, its Quality First™ system to dramatically improve access to real-time quality data for carriers, and its RemoteID™ system for scaling and improving tele-interview processes without the need for fixed call centers.
Inforce Policy Data Turns to Action
As the digitization of the life insurance industry persists, the concept of shared visibility of data is becoming more relevant. Shared visibility of information across distribution partners helps to keep carriers, BGAs, and advisors all aligned on what’s working as it should and what areas have room for improvement. When it comes to inforce policy management specifically, that shared visibility is especially important. But timely exchange of information is not enough to satisfy a proactive, compliant, and efficient inforce management strategy.
Visibility of inforce data alone is table-stakes. As you continue to seek ways to not only differentiate but also provide more value to your distribution partners, you need a way to make that data and information you share with each other actionable. That’s where a platform like Proformex comes in as the right partner for you and your community. Proformex connects visibility to efficiency, simplicity, and opportunity. By aggregating data and giving everyone access to it—their platform takes that data and provides you with powerful analytics and insights that you and your distribution partners can use to make data-driven decisions that produce real-world outcomes. And there’s no manual burden involved; by automatically surfacing both risks and opportunities to you and your distribution partners, you’ll now have the ability to proactively manage potential problems and seize revenue-generating opportunities. It’s a win for everyone, from carrier to client.
Simplifying the life insurance new business experience impacts agents, distributors, carriers and consumers. Mining and analyzing life inforce data and turning it into action creates new sales opportunities for advisors to engage with their clients. COVID obviously accelerated innovation in life insurance technology in 2020. For those solution providers that have adapted and taken on the challenges head on with new innovations, they will have staying power in our industry moving forward in 2021.
The World Of Electronic Health Records (EHR) For Life Insurance Underwriting
Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the hottest trend in life insurance underwriting today. The growing accessibility and innovation by solution providers is transforming the life underwriting process. Understanding Electronic Health Records and the benefits are important. We will also explore how you get access to EHR and who is offering EHR services.
What is EHR and How to “Triage” the Data?
I first reached out to Drake Livada, life sales, and Nicholas Irwin, director of underwriting, at Verisk to educate on EHR and how it has impacted the industry today. As the COVID-19 pandemic adds risk to countless business and personal interactions, ways of life are shifting toward the virtual world. Suddenly caught up in this transformation, life insurers are urgently seeking electronic sources of information to enable a digital customer journey, and electronic health data is coming to the fore.
Electronic health data can be compiled from many sources and shared digitally through mechanisms such as health information exchanges (HIEs). Health data can be either structured data such as coded diagnosis (ICD), lab testing results with standardized values, and vital signs; or unstructured data, which often includes narrative style notes to document vital information such as visit summary, radiology results, or pathology results. Some types of electronic health data such as pharmacy, lab, and health claims are much more widely available and easier to use than electronic health records, but the latter can provide greater granularity to support a more refined view of mortality risk.
The health data information available within the EHR can create opportunities for the digitization of life insurance underwriting. Unfortunately, the structure—or lack of it—in the EHR presents challenges. For starters there are 15 different medical coding systems representing over one million different codes that need to be handled and processed. Even if one built a system to handle these over one million unique codes there is still the challenge of numerous medical coding errors, duplicate values, and transcription errors which requires a robust data validation system to handle. Moreover, many key rating elements, such as cancer stage and EKG interpretations, are only available in unstructured format requiring natural language processing in order to ingest.
Due to the incredible challenge of processing this data nearly all carriers are still treating EHRs like attending physician statements and reviewing the entire file manually. This can take one to two hours per case as the files are often over 1000 pages long with most of the information being completely useless from an underwriting perspective. To solve this challenge Verisk has made the upfront investment on behalf of the industry and assembled a massive team of seasoned life underwriters, medical professionals, biostatisticians, and IT professionals to develop a comprehensive system to ingest, interpret, and evaluate EHR data in real time. Nicholas Irwin, director of underwriting, explained, “Verisk’s EHR Triage engine is an API that ingests a batch of EHR files (CCDs) via API and generates a one to two page summary of the key underwriting elements in the file(s) as well as providing an overall underwriting score in the form of number of debits. Verisk’s tool is called “triage” as it rates the simple cases that underwriters would rate in their sleep, while referring the more complex cases to underwriters. Verisk’s tool presents substantial time savings even for the cases Verisk refers to underwriters by supplying a summary of the key data elements an underwriter needs to rate the case. The intent of the tool is not to replace underwriters, but rather to enable underwriters to spend more of their time on assessing mortality risk and less of their time on scanning 1000 pages to find the 10 nuggets of useful data.”
An Easy Connection for Life Carriers and Distributors to EHR Data
As I continued my research, I discovered all roads lead to Human API. I recently synced up with Nick Zambruno, solutions lead, and Anthony Chan in Product Marketing to learn more about their platform and services. Human API is a leading insurtech vendor in the electronic health records (EHR) category. The Human API platform helps life insurance carriers create better client and agent experiences by delivering health records from a variety of different health data sources, both online and offline. The company started by accessing medical records through patient portal integrations but has expanded their connectivity to health information exchanges (HIEs) and national EHR networks such as Epic ChartGateway and Veradigm, as well as strategic partnerships for the delivery of traditional APS. Over the last few years Human API has helped carriers such as Prudential, Allstate, John Hancock, AAA and Principal offer a streamlined digital underwriting process that relies less on traditional underwriting requirements such as exams, fluids and attending physician statements. Carrier customers have cited hit rates of over 40 percent with the EHR platform and are optimistic that the health data can be used to automate manual elements of the underwriting process. The new EHR data sources added to the Human API platform enable hit rates to exceed 50 percent, while the addition of offline medical record retrieval partnerships will drive hit rates to nearly 100 percent.
Due to the final interoperability and information blocking rules from the Department of Health and Human Services going into effect in April 2021, Human API is increasingly surfacing more clinical notes in EHR data, positioning the platform to deliver comprehensive medical data access. “Access to comprehensive EHR data is foundational to innovation and transformation of the underwriting process. We’re encouraged by the progress made to date by Human API and look forward to working together to drastically improve the consumer purchase process and experience,” said Susan Ghalili, VP of Underwriting Transformation and chief underwriter at John Hancock Insurance.
Over the past year, distribution firms have also found value in partnering with Human API directly in an effort to access health data more quickly to expedite the sales process. LIBRA and AIMCOR were two new organizations that announced partnerships in the last year with Human API. Through the Human API platform, a firm can access EHR records and digitally share the data directly with a carrier in a secure setting so automation can still be realized at the carrier level. “The insurance industry is ripe for innovation. We’re incredibly excited to be the ‘one platform for all health data’ that helps carriers create and deliver better customer and agent experiences,” said Andrei Pop, CEO of Human API.
More EHR Services by Solution Providers You Work with Everyday
I continue to see more solution providers who actively or plan to add EHR to their services for distributors and carriers this year. Those solution providers who play key roles in the life insurance new business process like Management Research Services (MRS), MediPro Direct, and Employee Pooling (EP) explained the value EHR brings to their clients.
MRS is introducing Electronic Health Records to their suite of products with guidance from clients’ requirements. Their No Code platform will allow carriers to configure their relevant products workflows based on the data source. As carriers become more confident with their actuarial models with the onset of the data source, they will be able to regulate the data used in the process. They anticipate being able to deliver a searchable interface of CCDA (standardize the content and structure for medical documents)—information that will prioritize APS requirements to improve processing time and decrease non-placement issues.
As healthcare needs become increasingly mobile or virtual, today’s EHR systems need to do more than track medical records in fixed clinical settings. MediPro Direct’s MedLink software works across all service models, from clinical to mobile to virtual, and ties into MediPro Direct’s network of several thousand mobile medical examiners nationwide. This means their systems not only track patient data but also connect service providers with ways to expand their service model and better meet patient needs.
Employee Pooling’s (EP) value proposition is to remove obstacles that get in the way of sales and enhance the customer experience. When it comes to formal and informal underwriting, obtaining medical records can hinder the fluidity of the process. “The ability to obtain electronic health records (EHR) within hours versus the days and weeks it could take to retrieve traditional medical records is a game changer and surprisingly cost effective,” says Steven Lacher, VP of Business Development. “With formal underwriting still playing a vital role in our industry, it makes sense to try and whittle down the underwriting process time by getting health records to the underwriter and the carrier in an efficient and timely manner.”
EP recently partnered with Human API (HAPI) to improve turnaround times related to obtaining medical records for both formal and informal underwriting. EHR has been fully incorporated into EP’s Accelerated Informal platform, which reduces the standard informal underwriting process from weeks to days. Lacher states, “The goal is to help agencies quickly and affordably put their important cases up to bid with conviction. Accelerated Informals stands true to its name with EP’s in-house underwriters, on-demand access to prescription drug and clinical laboratory data, and now rapidly obtained EHR data.”
In 12-24 months from now, you probably can’t even imagine a world without electronic health records playing a key role in the life insurance underwriting process. The goal is always to arrive at an underwriting decision quickly and accurately. EHR data with innovative platforms are connecting solution providers with more carriers and distributors every month to accelerate the life underwriting process.