SilverBridge and HealthCloud have partnered to provide insurers with a solution that intelligently automates the insurance underwriting process by securely integrating health data and medical records to assess the risk of onboarding individual customers. This transforms the traditionally resource-intensive and time consuming underwriting process into a real-time customer experience.
“Healthcare data is a vital source to help underwriters make correct decisions on the risk and rating structure of individual clients. However, this information is typically spread across a variety of databases from external sources. Obtaining the information considerably slows down the process. And once collated, experts must still consider the data and perform a risk assessment,” says Patrick Ashton, Managing Executive at SilverBridge.
As the data is usually provided by clients themselves in medical questionnaires or accessed from multiple external datasets, it becomes a manual process for underwriters to allocate dedicated human resources to physically view all the information and then make the required underwriting decisions. In response to this need for external data, many insurers create their own integrations or databases that extract data from the likes of Home Affairs to verify a person’s identity and other relevant information to ascertain the risk of onboarding.
The partnership between SilverBridge and HealthCloud facilitates a secure health data exchange whereby patient data is collected from healthcare organisations, medical practices, pharmacies, laboratories, clinics, healthcare providers, and diagnostic and wearable devices, and presented to the insurer as a single data score with all available health parameters populated.
“Essentially, all this data is aggregated into a weighted single score which not only speeds up but also unlocks efficiencies in the process. In turn, SilverBridge injects sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, comprising the human insights of the underwriters, to automate the decision-making process as far as possible. This integrated solution alleviates much of the effort of having dedicated, senior individuals manage these onboarding processes manually.”
Following the recent partnership with Astute, which provides SilverBridge with valuable fraud risk scoring metrics, the health data and scoring provided by HealthCloud delivers a rich source of information to further automate and enhance business decisions on whether to approve policies, claims, and changes in cover. Ultimately, this provides SilverBridge with a complete 360-degree view of an individual customer’s risk profile.
HealthCloud provides a real-time overview of an individual’s medical history, including data for the past five to ten years. As such, the partnership creates proper automation in the underwriting process – especially important when it comes to both customer experience and risk management. New individual policy applications which would ordinarily require the likes of medical questionnaires, health screening, and blood tests that could take weeks to complete, can now happen in real-time thanks to the securely available and integrated health data.
“The rich data capabilities, intelligent algorithms, and secure real-time methodology that our platform offers, means that insurers now have access to a universe of health and medical record information that they would previously have found very difficult to access. Our collaboration with SilverBridge will offer the insurance industry immense value as the traditional processes are inefficient, costly and inaccurate. We aim to significantly disrupt this,” says Simon Spurr, Chief Executive Officer at HealthCloud.
A customer can therefore provide consent to the insurer as part of the onboarding process and the organisation will then be able to customise the underwriting decision in real-time based on how healthy (or unhealthy) that individual is.
“This is going to be a game-changer especially when it comes to disability cover. Instead of sending the policyholder every few months to be re-assessed, the HealthCloud data can provide insight as to whether the individual has been going for frequent medical check-ups, has been taking their chronic medication, etc. With SilverBridge, the information can be further enhanced to determine whether the individual’s condition is worsening or improving when comparing to previous periods,” says Ashton.
As the data is extremely sensitive in nature, the system relies on the scoring results provided by HealthCloud algorithms, with additional specific parameters provided, which enable decision-making but does not require data storage. The solution centres on injecting a level of AI decisioning into the process and creating full automation in a traditionally extremely manual process. By combining the respective expertise of SilverBridge and HealthCloud, a more precise understanding of an individual can be developed, and the intelligence built into the solution can show how healthy or unhealthy an individual is. The customer experience is dramatically improved as onerous questionnaires and tests are simply no longer required for decision-making.
HealthCloud will improve the speed, quality, and cost of gathering patient-centric data and enable a digital underwriting model. Combined with the SilverBridge AI and automation expertise, insurers can garner real-time insights from multiple experts such as underwriters, compliance, legal etc. and effortlessly apply those views to all new applications or changes to existing cover.
“This is a non-invasive and seamless way for insurers to make informed decisions about individual customers. It takes what was an expensive, time-consuming process, that introduced significant risk to the insurer, and redefines the process to become both easier and more dynamic for all participants,” concludes Ashton.
