Creating Customer Value From Life Insurance’s Billion-Dollar Health Records Business

Who runs one of the world’s largest personal health records businesses? Today the life insurance industry spends over $1 billion annually on the routine chore of creating and compiling the exams, lab tests, and attending physician statements (APSs) required to underwrite the 10 million plus life insurance applications submitted in the United States. Unlike most health records, these documents and files tend to be imaged or otherwise organized into digital formats to drive down the cost of the underwriting process.
What if this routine expense could be transformed into a value added service that customers appreciate and look forward to receiving? And what if the value of this service shifted the customer’s perspective to the point that they didn’t really mind the wait for their policy to be underwritten?

Regulator Group Moves To Reign In Secondary Market For Annuities

Life insurers and life settlement professionals are taking opposite sides over a model state regulation that would let deferred annuity carriers terminate a living or death benefit if a policy owner sells the annuity in the secondary market.

Mortality Impact of Obesity Said To Be Underestimated

Obesity may have an even greater impact on mortality than anticipated, according to a new method of adjusting for confounding.

Much Work to be Done Before the Boomers Bolt

Though more marathon than sprint, insurers are indeed in a race to glean as much as they can from a graying IT workforce possessing increasingly rare skill sets and a vast amount of institutional and system-specific knowledge.

Considering the stakes, carriers need to make tactical considerations, including shifting internal staff and outsourcing certain functions, in order to maximize the effectiveness of these workers.

Overweight Americans More Prone To Cognitive Decline

According to new research published in the latest issue of The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological and Medical Sciences, individuals with higher midlife body mass index (BMI) scores had significantly lower general cognitive ability and significantly steeper decline than their thinner counterparts over time.

Why Advisors Need To Compare LTC Provisions

Understanding long term care insurance terminology is often the cause of great confusion and frustration for advisors as well as consumers.

Much of the benefits terminology was derived from the long term disability industry, where it also bewildered applicants. Today, many LTC policies use simpler and more understandable concepts, but assessing the terms carefully is still essential, because terms differ between contracts and they may involve tradeoffs from traditional comprehensive LTC insurance.

The MetLife Study of Boomers in the Middle

The study provides an in-depth look at Americans born 1952 - 1958. The Baby Boomer generation, typically, has been characterized as a bloc of people who think and act as one monolithic generation, when it actually comprises three separate cohorts. This study found that there are distinct differences between these Middle Boomers and their older and younger generation mates.

Life Settlements: Technology and Service Providers

The life settlements industry will transact approximately US $13 billion annually from 2010 to 2013.

The Microeconomics of Personalized Medicine (McKinsey Quarterly)

Personalized medicine promises to increase the quality of clinical care and, in some cases, to decrease health care costs. The biggest hurdles are economic, not scientific.

How Health Care Costs Contribute To Income Disparity In The United States

Recent trends in health care costs, health care coverage, and household income have contributed to growing disparities between different income groups in the United States.

Southeast Asian Insurance Markets: A Market Review

On 25 February, 2010, A.M. Best's international panel discussed growth opportunities, the expansion of Takaful and re-Takaful insurance, the use of microinsurance and insurance pools and the changing distribution systems. The webinar was based on a new report authored by Yvette Essen, head of market analysis for A.M. Best's global financial services division.

Virtual Roundtable: Profiting in Emerging Markets

Emerging markets such as China and India continue to see growth in the financial services sector, providing opportunities for insurance companies based in more mature markets. What are the key opportunities and challenges that insurers face in doing business in emerging markets?

Communicating the Risk of Long-Term Disability

Good statistics are important, but they aren’t enough. People need to trust the source.

JHA Speakers: Share Data On 9-11-Related Mental Health Claims

An insurance group should support a project to find out how terrorist attacks, economic disasters and natural disasters affect the likelihood that U.S. residents with disability insurance will suffer from disabling mental health problems.

Life Products Hit With Steepest Sales Decline Since WWII

After a 26% dive in the first quarter compared to a year earlier, individual life insurance annualized premiums dropped 20% in the second quarter, according to a new survey.

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