In a recent interview with Reinsurance News, June Quah, Vice President, Integrated Analytics, Munich Re North America Life, discussed the reinsurance giant’s newest digital solution, Automated EHR Summarizer which is set to ensure efficient and accurate use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data for automated and programmatic life insurance underwriting.
In April, Munich Re Life US and Clareto, a Munich Re company, launched Automated EHR Summarizer.
During the interview, Quah was asked how effective she sees Automated EHR Summarizer being for life insurers.
“Automated EHR Summarizer makes it possible to use EHRs effectively and efficiently for underwriting purposes. It provides a solution for both the human underwriter as well as data for automated programs to use programmatically,” she said.
Adding: “To break that into two pieces: First, Summarizer provides a user-friendly visual interface, in the form of a report that the underwriter can use. It surfaces underwriting-relevant data and the data that is critical for underwriters to make an assessment. This enables the underwriter to quickly assess a case without manually shifting through the many pages of a raw EHR record.
“Secondly, Summarizer also provides that same data in a structured format. It’s curated data that’s tailored for use in an automated underwriting program. Carriers can use the data in their rules or models. This allows them to process insurance applications faster for automated decisioning and reduce that manual workload.”
Moving forward, EHR Summarizer is also a key example of how Munich Re is innovating to allow for a more streamlined and accurate picture of projected health trajectories within underwriting programs.
Quah expands on this: “The bottom line is Summarizer makes it easy to use data that was previously difficult and inaccessible. Electronic health records are a very comprehensive data source that offer a longitudinal view of an applicant’s medical history, but it’s been underutilised. EHR data can include everything from your physical measurement, your height, weight, your BMI, your blood pressure, your lab values the prescriptions that you’re taking, what diagnosis, what conditions you have, what procedures you’ve had and so on. All of this can now be retrieved quickly because most EHRs are returned within one to two days.
“What Summarizer is doing is making all of this data accessible to the human underwriter, as well as to automated decisioning systems. It streamlines the process by structuring the data and then summarising the data that’s critical and essential for an underwriter so that they can make decisions faster and make insurance available to people faster and more accurately.”
Due to EHR data being rather complex to manage, Quah noted that artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing techniques are incorporated into the solution when needed to help codify medical concepts and values, as well as extract and summarise the data points on an as needed basis.
“This is particularly useful for clinical notes which are unstructured data and AI and NLP are crucial to making this unstructured data more usable. In order for carriers to be confident in using the EHRs they need this data summarised and made available to downstream applications for use in their rules and models, and ultimately to make decisions confidently,” Quah said.
Even though EHR Summarizer is new to the market, Munich Re does have future plans for expansions in the near future, as Quah explains.
“There definitely will be many enhancements to come. In the near future we will be offering alitheia risk assessments through Automated EHR Summarizer. This means model scores and a risk class-based assessment on EHR data,” she said.
Adding: “Automated EHR Summarizer is also available through alitheia currently. Alitheia is Munich Re’s risk assessment and instant decisioning platform. Alitheia’s capability is real-time risk assessment, so the ability to consume this structured EHR data in alitheia enables alitheia to provide better rules, impairment-specific severity models and risk scores to enable more accurate assessments and price risk more accurately. These two technologies: Automated EHR Summarizer and alitheia, really are complementary in nature.”
