Insurance Insights From Our Product Team

These insurance insights capture the learnings our product team has discovered along the journey to building the best platform to drive innovation for our customers.

By Nate Seaman, VP of Product at Human API

During our recent sales kickoff, I presented a recap of the performance of our Health Intelligence Platform (HIP) last year, to reflect and celebrate the progress we made and milestones we achieved as a team. We were pretty excited about what we learned, so I decided to publish them as a collection of insights.

Insight #1: We’ve achieved the highest hit rate in the history of hit rates (and we’re just getting started).

Human API started as a company focused on building the largest patient portal EHR network in the country. A lot of the carriers used to think of us as “the patient portal company” but actually patient portals are only part of what we do.

Our goal was always to be the biggest and best source of EHR data in the industry so, in 2021, we significantly expanded our network to leverage a number of HIPAA authorization-based direct to EMR and HIE networks. The result is the largest and highest performing EHR network in the industry with robust access to every major EMR system, including Epic, Cerner, AllScripts, the VA, every Kaiser region and the long tail of smaller EMRs. The result of this effort speaks for itself. 

Last year, we were able to regularly cross the 50% hit rate threshold  across all clients on our HIP platform and hit as high as 54% in one week. This is measured as records delivered over orders placed. 

Our hit rates regularly surpassed 50% - a milestone in the insurance industry.

In some ways, 50% is just a number, but the implication of crossing this specific threshold is that for the first time, waiting for an APS record is now the exception, not the norm for HIP customers. 

And, we’re just getting started. Our network team is aggressively adding more sources of data from new types of networks to ensure we continue to be the biggest EHR network available.

Insurance Insight #2: A faster fax machine isn’t enough for innovation.

Looking back at 2021, we were happy to see a major uptick in carrier interest with starting to leverage structured EHR data. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, observed that as industries adopt new technology, customers initially map their existing workflow and process to that new technology. But eventually the benefits of the new technology start to shine and the work itself begins to change.  

We already see this same pattern taking shape with life insurance underwriting. Most of our initial work with carriers was focused on accelerating the existing manual underwriting process - an approach we lovingly call “using a faster fax machine”. But because our platform can normalize and structure all the health data we retrieve, the conversations are shifting to focus on how to use digital data to do completely new things or refine old processes using a data-informed approach. 

Some of this is around using data to improve how carriers operate. For example, we now regularly analyze EHR and APS ordering behavior for carriers on our Health Intelligence Platform to provide a detailed analysis of where EHR records fit most effectively within their underwriting guidelines as well as comparing behavioral differences across underwriters to identify opportunities for training. One cool part of ordering the APS with Human API is that just by using the platform, you generate all the data we need to do this kind of analysis.

We’re helping our carriers analyze EHR and APS ordering behavior to find ways to optimize the process.

We’ve also been focusing on ways to expand the scope and success rates of accelerated underwriting programs beyond the young and healthy, as well as modeling ways to expand the market for Simplified Issue by adding additional risk classes. 

Lots more to come out of this work, but our key takeaway is that the next stage of innovation in underwriting hinges on clinical and operational data expertise - which requires more than just a faster fax machine. Stay tuned as we share more about our learnings in future insights.