Swiss Re and Diameter Health join forces for breakthrough in digital health data

  • First ever scalable solution to use electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting
  • Will greatly help life insurers improve the speed and quality of their underwriting

Swiss Re and Diameter Health join forces to offer first-ever scalable solution to use electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting.

Swiss Re and Diameter Health, a leader in health data interoperability, enter a partnership to transform complex clinical electronic health data into organised, usable information. This will accelerate Swiss Re’s efforts to help life insurers improve the speed and quality of their underwriting – thereby providing end-consumers with a better experience.

Today, when life insurance applicants provide access to their medical information for underwriting purposes, the process is typically very slow, manual and paper-based. As insurers look to digitise and streamline procedures using electronic health records, they are faced with a new challenge: the sheer size and complexity of data.

In the US alone, there are one billion health care encounters each year and more than one million different medical codes tracked by hundreds of different vendors. The result is redundant and disorganised data that cannot be reliably used for underwriting purposes. Diameter Health’s proprietary Fusion data-refinement technology solves this problem with its ability to normalise, enrich and intelligently reorganise and summarise health data and provide a consolidated, secure view of a patient.

By pairing this technology with Swiss Re’s risk knowledge and underwriting expertise, Swiss Re can now deploy clinical health data across a variety of innovative use cases that make way for faster, less expensive and more accurate underwriting and pricing. This information also helps insurers speed the time from application to issue, which helps keep costs down and strengthens a fair underwriting process for all – ultimately making insurance more accessible.

The joint effort begins in the US. A natural starting point will be the integration into Swiss Re’s existing suite of Magnum Underwriting Solutions. The enriched data can be easily ingested and automated via Magnum’s core underwriting rules to expand its functionality and enable more powerful, precise risk assessment. The result means a truly future-ready underwriting process that is faster, smarter and better for the end-consumer with simpler, more intuitive and automated processes.

“Being able to accurately use electronic health record data is one of the biggest challenges for Swiss Re’s clients. This urgency certainly increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic which magnified the difficulties of collecting physical medical records from doctor’s offices or through intrusive home visits. By combining Swiss Re’s risk knowledge with Diameter Health’s technology, we cut through complexity and can offer a range of innovative options that enable our clients to use clinical data to effectively assess and confidently price biometric risk,“ said Jolee Crosby, Head of Swiss Re’s Global L&H Underwriting and Medical Reinsurance. Until now no one has been able to use clinical data in this way. The partnership with Diameter Health leapfrogs our ability to help insurers innovate without sacrificing strong, confident risk assessment.“

“We are proud to partner with Swiss Re in its work to make the world more resilient,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health. “Our health data optimisation technology will enable Swiss Re to transform rapidly growing volumes of raw digital health data into a strategic asset. We look forward to working together to apply this data to make a meaningful difference for insurers and the people who seek to purchase insurance.“

Swiss Re

The Swiss Re Group is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer, working to make the world more resilient. It anticipates and manages risk – from natural catastrophes to climate change, from ageing populations to cyber crime. The aim of the Swiss Re Group is to enable society to thrive and progress, creating new opportunities and solutions for its clients. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1863, the Swiss Re Group operates through a network of around 80 offices globally. It is organised into three Business Units, each with a distinct strategy and set of objectives contributing to the Group’s overall mission.

Swiss Re has been at the forefront of innovation in automated underwriting for more than 30 years and this leadership is reflected in its recent #1 ranking for overall underwriting management in the latest NMG Consulting 2020 Life & Health Reinsurance study.

Magnum

Swiss Re's Magnum Underwriting Solutions help insurance companies make better, faster underwriting decisions and provides a simplified application journey for the end consumer.  Designed by underwriters, for underwriters, Magnum offers full-service automation, backed by Life Guide – the industry’s No. 1 underwriting guide and the go-to resource for the latest research and understanding of biomedical risk.

https://www.swissre.com/reinsurance/life-and-health/solutions/magnum-automated-underwriting-solution.html

Diameter Health 

Diameter Health is the standard for health data optimization, transforming raw information into the highest quantity and quality of interoperable data for healthcare organisations. Powered by automated, scalable, auditable technology and a team of industry experts, Diameter Health delivers actionable and enriched healthcare data that enables real-time transactions, improved analytics, reduced cost, and better care outcomes. The Diameter Health platform enables organisations that depend on multi-source healthcare data streams, such as health plans, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), healthcare IT, life insurers, and health systems to realise greater value from their data. For more information, visit www.diameterhealth.com.

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