The Electronic Health Records (EHR) landscape is evolving rapidly. For those who aren’t directly involved day-to-day, it’s difficult to keep up with the rapid pace of change and the impact EHRs are having on life underwriting. Since acquiring Clareto in 2022, we at Munich Re Life US have enjoyed a front-row seat in this market transformation by engaging with our clients on EHR pilots and implementing various EHR use cases throughout the risk assessment value chain. So we thought it would be helpful to share a snapshot of the rapid progress stemming from the Munich Re and Clareto partnership.

Let’s start with an eye-opening stat: 93% of carriers participating in our last accelerated underwriting survey were using or evaluating EHRs in some aspect of their underwriting process. Two-thirds of these companies had already implemented programs by mid-2022, a seismic jump from 23% that had implemented EHRs as of mid-2020.¹

This rapid progress in EHR utilization is driven by several developments: A significantly higher hit rate, the introduction of new solutions to optimize the EHR source data underwriters order, and the development of new tools that accelerate the expansion of EHR use cases in the market.

In the second quarter of 2024, Clareto reported that its  industry-leading network of 250 million covered lives is now producing match rates of over 75% of the US population, with successful delivery of medical data on over 55% of cases. Furthermore, nearly 40% of queries produce records from more than one medical provider.² Looking forward, Clareto has a robust pipeline of recently signed data sources currently being onboarded that will add tens of millions of additional lives to the company’s EHR+ network.

According to internal Clareto data, on average, approximately 50% of EHRs are delivered within one hour, 80% within 24 hours, and 90% within 48 hours. This is a revolutionary reduction in turnaround time compared to ordering an APS.