Hank George Interviews Coleen Moser
Originally published in Hot Notes September, 2020
Several of my friends lost their livelihoods when EMSI suddenly shut down. We offered to assist them in their hunt for new opportunities. That is when we found about eNoah.
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We want Hot Notes readers to get a proverbial “bird’s eye view” at what eNoah does, and we asked my friend Coleen if she would do this interview and answer the questions we have.
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She said “yes,” and here is what she’s shared.
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What is eNoah?
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eNoah is a global provider of services for life insurers. These include contract underwriting, medical record retrieval and medical record summarization.
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The recent expansion of U.S. onshore operations enables eNoah to provide an accelerated end-to-end process speeding up decision-making by insurers.
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What do you consider to be the biggest challenge life insurance carriers and underwriters face today?
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The capacity to adapt to evolving market needs.
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Producers (agents, brokers) and insurance applicants have become accustomed to the “Amazon experience,” where they can select the product they want at the price they are comfortable with and have it in as little as one day. This expectation complicates the life insurance application-to-issue process. Attending physicians’ statements can take weeks to acquire and review.
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Because of this, there is increasing pressure to make faster decisions with less information while cutting costs and continuing to be competitive.
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Unfortunately, insurance has been one of the slowest sectors to adopt new technologies. This can be a herculean task, in part because the amount of data in the medical histories, that underwriters must review, keeps increasing.
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Accessing records through patient portals and e-health records has exposed gaps in data and inconsistent formatting. Many essential portions of the standard medical record may not be included, increasing the odds of underwriting errors.
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Complete medical records can exceed 1,000 pages. They typically include lab slips, medications, ECG tracings, clinic notes, follow up notes, surgical procedure summaries and countless other documents. It is a tedious process for an underwriter to review every page of the APS to find those key bits of information that can make or break a case.
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eNoah’s mission is to greatly reduce decision-making intervals by relieving underwriters of most of this burden. This is accomplished via customizable solutions ranging from a traditional medical record summary to utilizing eXtract Plus, which utilizes innovative technology for a system-driven overview of the APS. When insurers deploy this novel resource, there are always going to be those occasions when the underwriter needs a full summary of the APS. When requested, this can be done within 48 hours.
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How do eNoah’s eXtract Plus and APS Summarizations speed up the risk assessment process and take pressure off underwriters?
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Underwriting requires exquisite attention to detail honed by years of experience and a broad knowledge base. eNoah’s focus is creating powerful tools to help underwriters make accurate decisions more rapidly and less tediously.
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These tools were built for underwriters by underwriters that created resources and software leveraging the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. ML and AI can —with great accuracy — read through and filter a client’s entire medical history spanning several hundred pages in just minutes, and provide deep insights to the underwriter to quickly make informed decisions.
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eXtract Plus gives underwriters quick, easy access to the critical decision-making data on the most complex cases. It is a versatile platform that can be used in many scenarios, depending on what the underwriter is trying to achieve.
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For example, an underwriter needing to check for certain conditions before making a decision can now run a search and very quickly see what’s happening in terms of medications, labs, procedures, how many years someone has been on a treatment, frequency of drugs taken, and dosages. And this is done with great accuracy that is realized by mitigating or eliminating human errors.
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eXtract Plus was designed to be intuitive and easy to use. Access can be provided via a secure login, and training for most underwriters can take place in less than an hour via a video tutorial, with the eNoah team readily available to ease that transition.
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eNoah data are stored in the U.S. on a secure server with HIPAA-compliant and ISO-Certified protocols that protect data.
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How much underwriting time can be saved using eNoah’s products and services?
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A traditional APS review can range anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the length of the APS. Internal studies suggest 20-50% of underwriter time is saved by eXtract Plus.
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eXtract Plus is more than a simple search engine. The software also provides underwriters with content directly from the medical records itself.
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For example, let’s say I want to know what medications a client has taken over their lifetime, or how a medication relates to lab values for certain treatments. You can see all pertinent data needed in these contexts to make a decision in a matter of minutes. And it can be customized easily to best suit the needs of each company.
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Thank you, Coleen.
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All of this technology is fascinating even for an old technophobe.
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I confess that I’m coming to appreciate how its capacity to rid us of tedium empowers underwriting professionals to make the best possible decisions on every case they see.
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To read more about Hot Notes September 2020 click here.
