Despite over 90% of carriers in a Munich Re survey stating they were evaluating or using electronic health records (EHRs), some carriers express uncertainty about their practical application in life underwriting. Many question whether they can consistently access the appropriate medical records in a format that integrates into their underwriting workflow. To clear up this misconception, let's take a straightforward look at whether EHRs are truly ready for primetime in life insurance underwriting.

The landscape for EHRs has shifted significantly. With a provider network that now covers more than 75% of the US population, Clareto, a Munich Re company, has reliable patient-permission access to the records carriers are looking for.[1] Leveraging Munich Re’s extensive experience in risk assessment and data analytics, we’ve applied a life insurance underwriting lens to EHRs.

These advancements in data access and life underwriting focus have opened the door to broader adoption of EHRs. But many would say there’s still a big elephant in the room: usability. Many of our carrier partners frequently ask “How can I reliably access EHR data?” Let’s take a look.

Here’s a high-level overview of the key outputs for our EHR data. Our focus continues to be meeting carriers exactly where they are on their EHR journey. Recognizing that adopting any new tool involves a learning curve, we’ve aimed to make the transition as easy as possible by offering flexible options tailored to each carrier’s needs and comfort level:

• Hit the ground running: Munich Re's Automated EHR Summarizer is the ready-to-use solution that highlights the most relevant EHR data for life underwriters. Delivered as a human-readable HTML report, it’s incredibly easy to use and integrates effortlessly into an underwriting workflow.  For more advanced needs, companies can also access structured EHR data to be used in their rules engines and models.
• Need to go deeper: We also offer normalization, standardization and deduplication services for full EHR delivery from two leading players in the healthcare industry, Availity and CareEvolution.
• When the entire EHR files are needed: With underwriting-focused tools like our Summarizer, it’s often not necessary to parse through the raw EHR data, but when a complex case warrants it, we provide raw files from various data providers with the option to merge documents into a single human-readable PDF.

Clearly, we are big believers in the valuable data in EHRs and their future as a bedrock of life underwriting. Our main goal is to put the right data into the hands (and workbenches) of life underwriters in a way that meets their specific needs.