Comprehensive cost-benefit study confirms EHR value across life insurance underwriting use cases

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?

These questions prompted us to take a step back and look at EHRs as we would any new data source and ask where they can most easily and effectively be employed in life underwriting. To answer this, we needed to quantify the incremental value of an EHR as new evidence in various underwriting environments. As a result, we conducted a series of rigorous and extensive EHR studies – likely the industry’s largest review to date. Our aim was to arrive at the real answers and not simply validate our original beliefs about the benefits of EHRs in life underwriting.  While the study confirmed the effectiveness of EHRs as a core underwriting tool, it also revealed other use cases where the immediate positive impact, value, and ease of EHR implementation may outweigh APS replacement. It additionally showed specific situations, particularly those with EHRs from a less relevant physician or those with low data EHRs, where APS still delivers value on top of EHRs. 

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

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: