September 2018 - Carriers retain vast amounts of unstructured claims data and create more each day. Technologies to unlock the value of this data are becoming a bigger part of insurers’ arsenals to address more effective claims management. While large carriers have led the way in unstructured claims data use, small and midsize carriers are catching up as the technology becomes more available.

This brief examines the uses and challenges of unstructured data in claims based on data from a recent study of 44 insurer CIO members of the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council.

Topics Covered

• Current State, including adoption and challenges.
• Usage and Insights Derived among insurers.
• Benefits Realized among insurers that leverage unstructured data for claims today.

Key Points and Findings

• Unstructured claims data usage is currently tactical. Insurers deploy it in areas like claims fraud and severity indication. Few deploy unstructured data for strategic needs like detecting underwriting weakness.
• Most challenges to adoption of unstructured claims data are equal in weight. Challenges include funding, ROI, access to tools, data integrity, and business interest. Carriers do not find one challenge more daunting than the others.
• Investment belts could be tightening, choking off opportunity. Hard ROI is of growing interest for funding—and is increasingly a requirement. This can stall efforts such as data mining.