Underwriting challenges: Stay abreast
For those of you who have tried to assist your teenage children with their maths homework, the need for ongoing training is a rhetorical question. In the medical underwriting field, ongoing training is becoming more critical than ever.
In the medical field, information is doubling every two years, especially in genomic and molecular medicine. It is predicted that within the next years, it will become affordable for individuals to have their genetic make up sequenced and assessed for risk of developing diseases in the future. That would change the face of medical underwriting as we know it.
Role of underwriters
As the role of the underwriter evolves the training requirements have to keep pace. Underwriters not only underwrite medical risk. In addition to the medical knowledge they need, they have to be skilled in work flow systems, have excellent communication skills to liaise with clients and intermediaries, be experienced in financial underwriting, occupational risk and avocational risk, to name a few. Other areas of speciality include research and development, auditing and marketing.
New approach to underwriting
Medical advances will impact the complexity of information available at the underwriting stage. It will also impact life expectancy thus requiring underwriting ratings to reflect any prolongation of life, and even change the incidence of claims. As an example, a greater percentage of people are surviving a heart attack only to become disabled later in life from cardiac failure. In this scenario the incidence of disability claim will increase.
Taking cardiology as a further example, information is available to assess risk, based not only on the fact that a person has had a heart attack, but also on the vessels involved, the surgery performed, the drugs taken post intervention and the changes to lifestyle risks such as cessation of smoking.
Predictive underwriting
It is easy to see that the amount of medical information required to best equip an underwriter is enormous. In the future, clinicians will be able to go even further and look at a person’s genetic makeup and predict to a greater degree whether a person is, for instance, at higher or lower risk for an infarct or diabetes or cancer in the first place.
Training is critical
The training of underwriters is vital to our industry. As with other specialities, we are facing a skills shortage as experienced underwriters relocate to the larger global village. These positions have to be filled, as do new positions in expanding established life assurers and new players entering the market.
At present, the Insurance Institute of South Africa and Unisa offer numerous courses covering topics such as life insurance servicing, principles of life underwriting, life insurance claims, and health insurance. The larger players in the industry offer in house training programmes to their staff. Industry bodies such as SASIMU are also to be applauded for the training they provide.
Wisdom of the collective
We are fortunate enough to have a mature insurance market in this country with a wealth of experience at our disposal. As an industry, we are also well represented at international conferences, a great way to keep up to date.
But to stay abreast of the deluge of information requires the wisdom of the collective. There is definitely scope for the private sector to strengthen the affiliation with academic institutions to enhance training programmes available in this country.
