Life Insurance Applicants are Ready to Share Health Data Digitally

There’s a common industry misconception that applicants are reluctant to use patient portals to share medical records in the life insurance application process. However, new research from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions shows that digital access to health data is already normalized—and that life insurance applicants are comfortable sharing health information with carriers through patient portals.

Insights from the LexisNexis® Life Insurance Consumer Experience Study explores sources of application friction, the impact on application outcomes and the preferences consumers have when sharing their medical information in the life insurance application process.

The study’s key findings:

• The amount of required effort is the leading reason for abandoning the life insurance application process, cited by 79% of applicants. The greatest sources of effort stem from providing detailed medical information—particularly describing medical conditions (60%) and collecting information about healthcare providers (56%).  The level of effort required is a pain point even among those applicants who ultimately complete the process (65%).
• The time required to complete an application remains an unresolved pain point across the industry. Among applicants who abandon the application process, 63 percent pointed to the time required as one of the top reasons for dropping out. Time also affects those who complete the process: 36 percent of completers still identify it as a pain point, and among those who find the process time unacceptable, 91 percent say it negatively impacts their overall satisfaction, with potential implications for long term policy persistency.
• Patient portals are applicants’ preferred method of sharing medical information with a carrier, compared to medical record exchanges or manual processes. Preference for portals is driven largely by ease of use (77%), completeness of information (74%), and speed of record retrieval (65%). Adoption is already widespread: 82% of applicants report having access to a patient portal, and 91% have used one within the past 12 months.

This points to an opportunity for life insurance carriers to better align the application process with how consumers access and manage their health data to help reduce abandonment and drive higher placement rates and customer satisfaction.

And because life insurance applicants typically connect carriers to the providers most relevant to their care, portal-based approaches are more likely to return medical information that is recent and relevant to the risk, which enables faster underwriting decisions.

When life insurance carriers enable this direct way of collecting electronic medical records at the beginning of the application process, they can reduce follow-ups, shorten timelines and mitigate the friction that leads to abandoned applications and lower satisfaction.