• First ever scalable solution to use electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting
  • Will greatly help life insurers improve the speed and quality of their underwriting

Swiss Re and Diameter Health join forces to offer first-ever scalable solution to use electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting.

Swiss Re and Diameter Health, a leader in health data interoperability, enter a partnership to transform complex clinical electronic health data into organised, usable information. This will accelerate Swiss Re’s efforts to help life insurers improve the speed and quality of their underwriting – thereby providing end-consumers with a better experience.

Today, when life insurance applicants provide access to their medical information for underwriting purposes, the process is typically very slow, manual and paper-based. As insurers look to digitise and streamline procedures using electronic health records, they are faced with a new challenge: the sheer size and complexity of data.

In the US alone, there are one billion health care encounters each year and more than one million different medical codes tracked by hundreds of different vendors. The result is redundant and disorganised data that cannot be reliably used for underwriting purposes. Diameter Health’s proprietary Fusion data-refinement technology solves this problem with its ability to normalise, enrich and intelligently reorganise and summarise health data and provide a consolidated, secure view of a patient.

By pairing this technology with Swiss Re’s risk knowledge and underwriting expertise, Swiss Re can now deploy clinical health data across a variety of innovative use cases that make way for faster, less expensive and more accurate underwriting and pricing. This information also helps insurers speed the time from application to issue, which helps keep costs down and strengthens a fair underwriting process for all – ultimately making insurance more accessible.

The joint effort begins in the US. A natural starting point will be the integration into Swiss Re’s existing suite of Magnum Underwriting Solutions. The enriched data can be easily ingested and automated via Magnum’s core underwriting rules to expand its functionality and enable more powerful, precise risk assessment. The result means a truly future-ready underwriting process that is faster, smarter and better for the end-consumer with simpler, more intuitive and automated processes.

“Being able to accurately use electronic health record data is one of the biggest challenges for Swiss Re’s clients. This urgency certainly increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic which magnified the difficulties of collecting physical medical records from doctor’s offices or through intrusive home visits. By combining Swiss Re’s risk knowledge with Diameter Health’s technology, we cut through complexity and can offer a range of innovative options that enable our clients to use clinical data to effectively assess and confidently price biometric risk,“ said Jolee Crosby, Head of Swiss Re’s Global L&H Underwriting and Medical Reinsurance. “Until now no one has been able to use clinical data in this way. The partnership with Diameter Health leapfrogs our ability to help insurers innovate without sacrificing strong, confident risk assessment.“

“We are proud to partner with Swiss Re in its work to make the world more resilient,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health. “Our health data optimisation technology will enable Swiss Re to transform rapidly growing volumes of raw digital health data into a strategic asset. We look forward to working together to apply this data to make a meaningful difference for insurers and the people who seek to purchase insurance.

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