We live in a digitized age where the insurance industry has been lately striving to make its presence entirely online. And the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed this process of digitization. Almost every insurance niche organization depends on cloud technology for their day-to-day operations, and health insurance businesses are no different.

Well, for the health insurance sector, underwriting is a crucial business function that got severely impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since it impacts business profitability and competitiveness, insurance companies must automate risk assessment and underwriting processes to facilitate contactless experiences to employees and customers. And for doing so, nothing can be better than implementing cloud computing into your existing insurance architecture.

As per reports, due to the COVID-19 situation and the increasing pace of cloud and other digital solution adoption in the Indian insurance industry, the online sales of health insurance policies have shot up to 30%. It evidences how effective digitalization can be in enhancing health insurers’ operations. So now, let’s see how cloud technology contributes to health insurance underwriting and future-proofs your business.

Easy data access and secure storage for the underwriting of data

Updated and accurate data is necessary for effective health insurance underwriting. Thus, cloud-based storage solutions give you easy access to unstructured and structured data obtained from curated data sources. Besides, the data stored on the cloud is highly secure due to the encryption of the transmitted data over several networks, lessening the chance of data theft.

The best thing about cloud computing is that it can even process unstructured data and offer valuable insights to health insurers to enhance underwriting outcomes. In this health insurance industry, wearable data is one of the most preferred unstructured data, as there is a direct relationship between this data and the health of the person who will get insured. So, your cloud-integrated platform can easily pull and store such non-generic data from wearables like smartwatches, fitness bands, etc., for better risk analysis and optimum price determination.

Besides, cloud-stored data is more consistent. As everyone from your team accesses the same data virtually, its quality is well-maintained. Also, if any revision or update is made in the cloud database, it is notified to everyone in the team, reducing the chances of inconsistent data reporting and confusion among employees. Thus, cloud technology not only renders easy access and secure data storage but also controls data quality for more effective health insurance underwriting.

Better risk assessment for proper price determination

Most cloud service providers now offer completely managed AI-ML integrated services to develop, train, and deploy ML models to enhance underwriters' efficiency and eradicate non-core activities. These technologies can facilitate hassle-free data aggregation and ensure data integrity and quality. As the health insurance industry primarily deals with unstructured data, ML-based NLP systems can easily determine contextual insights and relationships. Hence, AI-ML model integrated cloud platforms can execute customized risk profiling.

Also, a few cloud platforms come with ML-based video and audio processing mechanisms to offer virtual contactless risk assessments to their clients. Thus, a potential AI-ML model integrated with the cloud technology can efficiently identify health insurance underwriting risks like age, medical history, etc., particular to the insurer’s needs. Then, cloud computing integrates all these risk data into a single environment, allowing insurers to make a better decision about the risk and determine the premium accordingly.

Besides, automated underwriting models can also be developed based on AI-ML algorithms in your cloud platform to avoid cognitive biasing and perform more effective underwriting. If needed, along with the risk analysis reports and premium pricing generated by your cloud platform, human supervision can also be added to leverage the entire workflow. Thus, cloud computing can help health insurance underwriters mitigate frauds and risks while improving and reducing disaster recovery costs.

Easy internal collaboration for quicker operations

It is often seen that due to lack of internal communication in an insurance company, underwriting and policy issuance gets delayed, resulting in loss of customers. So, this is where the collaboration technologies of a cloud-integrated insurance platform can come to your rescue. It improves underwriters’ coordination with other departments and members to ensure that the customer lifecycle is appropriately managed.

Collaboration technologies allow underwriters to send or receive files, edit data in real-time, share online chat-based workspaces, and do audio and video conferencing with their teammates for getting in-depth knowledge required for effective risk profiling. Cloud also enables underwriters to collaborate with agents and the claims management team in real-time to write new lines for your business and understand the claims model better for providing the correct price at the right time respectively.

Besides, easy version control, co-authoring of documents, file syncing, and instant transfer of large files are some prime features offered by cloud-based collaboration tools, which facilitates effective internal communication and leverages underwriting outcomes. Thus, collaboration through the cloud connects underwriters to every team of your health insurance company to maintain stability in risk analysis and premium pricing while saving time in offering a quote and helping win more deals.

Final words

Thus, it is evident that cloud technology has every kind of remote facility that a health insurance underwriter ever needs. Hence, if you want to enhance your operational efficiencies and boost profitability, it is imperative to opt for cloud-based solutions to transform your underwriting process digitally. However, always follow an action-based and customer-driven strategy for enhanced growth.