Streamlining Your Underwriting Process

Underwriting a life insurance application requires gathering and obtaining information as well as the secondary, and more important, process of assessing the risk found in that information. Both of these steps can be cumbersome and time consuming, especially as the complexity of the case increases.

First, there is the administrative work of obtaining the requirements: ordering and scheduling labs, calling doctor’s offices to obtain the medical records and tracking down special authorizations – all of which take a significant amount of time and require very thorough organization.

Then, once you’ve received the documents, you need to review and assess the risk from each one. In more complex cases, you may even need to order multiple sets of records as well as other medical requirements like EHRs and claims data. This becomes even more administratively burdensome and also means the underwriter is spending more time reviewing these additional requirements.

However, there are ways of making the entire underwriting process smoother and more efficient. You can delegate the administrative work to an assistant-type role or even work with a third-party vendor to manage it for you. For example, APS retrieval services are an excellent choice to offload that work from the underwriter, allowing them to focus purely on risk assessment. Then, once the medical requirements have been received, you can further streamline the process by having them summarized for quick review.

DigitalOwl’s Underwriting Abstract provides a unique solution that quickly organizes and analyzes the medical requirements into an easy-to-navigate summary. Traditional medical records, electronic health records, medical claims data, prescription checks and lab results all can be processed into one document for the underwriter to efficiently and accurately review.

With traditional APS summary services, you are only receiving a summary of the medical records and relying on the person summarizing them to glean the pertinent information accurately. Since DigitalOwl is utilizing state-of-the-art technology to extract the information directly from the requirements, you receive the objective, accurate information quickly.

There are also multiple ways to use the Digital Underwriting Abstract to cater to the specific needs of the underwriter’s review. A full review includes the key health indicators like BMI, cholesterol and blood pressure readings, all easily organized by chronological date and providing the last year’s average. Then, all the major key impairments are sorted for the underwriter to easily analyze along with their associated medications, procedures, lab results and family history if only a focused view is needed.

There is even a section to review a short summary extraction of each encounter in chronological order if you need to review everything quickly in a format you’re familiar with.

Whether the intention is to perform a full review of the medical history or a more targeted focused view of a specific impairment to get an understanding of the risk, DigitalOwl’s Underwriting Abstract is one of the best ways to streamline the underwriting process. By reducing the time spent reviewing each individual medical requirement separately as well as having the information quickly organized and analyzed, the underwriter is able to make decisions faster and more efficiently.