Four Common Pain Points and Strategies to Improve the Death Claims Process

To adhere to these laws, insurers either built or outsourced processes to match their policyholder data to the DMF or similar databases; however, the match criteria outlined in state regulatory agreements necessitated a secondary death validation to confirm a policyholder death – often a manual and time-consuming process. To complicate matters, thousands of erroneous deaths are reported in the DMF each year, further necessitating a sound validation process that mitigates the risk of a falsely reported death from a single source. A death validation process that cross-references deaths reported in the DMF against other death sources, such as state vital statistics and obituaries, can reduce or eliminate the manual process that insurance companies use to validate deaths. This streamlined process can be automated for millions of records and completed in a fraction of the time that it would require of a person or team. It should use common data elements available across multiple death sources, such as name and death date, to identify the same decedent, but also accommodate for slight variations (e.g., nicknames, misspellings) and false positive reduction (e.g., common names) that might otherwise result in no matches or mismatches.