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EHR Retro Studies Series: Cost-benefit study confirms EHR value across life insurance underwriting use cases

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Munich Re Life US underwriters, in partnership with Clareto, a Munich Re company, have been working extensively with electronic health records (EHRs) for several years. Our ability to leverage EHRs for risk assessment has grown significantly with this experience. This led us to think anew about the efficacy of EHRs across multiple underwriting use cases: Does the original and widely held industry belief that EHRs’ primary and best use would be to replace the attending physician statements (APS) stand up to scrutiny? Is the focus on APS replacement even the best use case for EHR adoption?

EHR Retro Studies Discussion:

Confirming EHR value across life insurance underwriting use cases

Study overview

Over the course of our work with Clareto, the Munich Re Life US team has reviewed thousands of EHRs. For this series, we focused on a subset of over 800 lives using underwriting files provided by multiple carriers representing a cross-section of markets.¹ The goal was to determine the impact of incorporating EHRs in multiple use cases:

Non-fluid underwriting/accelerated underwriting: This is the first in a series of papers covering findings from the studies around the protective and operational value of EHRs in underwriting workflows.
Fluid underwriting: coming in January 2025
APS underwriting: coming in March 2025

¹Munich Re is committed to its legal and contractual obligations for the responsible handling of data.

Top-level results by use case

The results provided us with a data set that allowed us to see the impact of EHRs on the cost of underwriting evidence, the time savings of ordering underwriting evidence, and the overall mortality savings provided by EHRs. As seen in the chart below, this enabled us to review the impact across all these factors in each use case and to form an overall conclusion as to how advantageous the use of EHRs can be.

Here are the top-level findings for each use case:

Table showing the top-level findings for each use case of EHRs

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The path forward

The results showed that EHRs can now deliver on their long-awaited promise and revealed specific areas where carriers can derive the most benefit from EHRs. Given that underwriting approaches vary across the industry, we welcome the opportunity to perform this analysis for interested carriers. Please contact us to discuss this study and to get a better understanding of the value EHRs can bring to your own use cases.