Industry urged to standardize information gathering

The insurance industry should collaborate more on data standardization, experts say.

“The industry’s needs to figure out how to standardize the data,” said Patrick J. O’Neill, president of Redhand Advisors L.L.C., an Atlanta-based information technology consulting firm.

One possibility is to have a consortium that would aggregate the data so clients could get ready access to the data in a standard format, Mr. O’Neill said. “That would make life easier.”

“One of the things that we’ve done here is we have our own risk management information system, and we can have feeds from other carriers’ systems into our own,” said Kristen Peed, director of risk management for Cleveland-based CBIZ Inc. and board member of the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc.

“It involves a lot of setup up front” because of different nomenclature, she said. This approach also calls for significant resources, both “from a money standpoint and also from a time standpoint,” she said.

Ms. Peed said she would welcome third-party administrators and insurers getting together to create a standardized system. “In the end, I think it would really help the carriers” understand risk underwriting better because there would be one common language for them to interpret, Ms. Peed said.

“Ideally, there should be more conversations on consistency” industrywide, said Chris Knight, Atlanta-based analytics practice leader for Beecher Carlson Holdings Inc., the large-account unit of Brown & Brown Inc.

Also, “There should be drop-down and predetermined options, as well as general accountability on the data quality,” Mr. Knight said. “That combination would go a long way in combating any missing data or ambiguity in the data.”