Cathay Life Insurance will use Lunit’s INSIGHT CXR AI solution to identify abnormalities in its applicants’ chest X-rays, potentially modernizing a manual underwriting process and uncovering a new non-clinical market for AI vendors.
Lunit INSIGHT CXR will be integrated into Cathay’s underwriting workflow, with the goals of enhancing its radiologists’ accuracy and efficiency, while improving Cathay’s underwriting decisions.
Lunit and Cathay have reason to be optimistic about this endeavor, given that their initial proof of concept study found that INSIGHT CXR:
- Improved Cathay’s radiologists’ reading accuracy by 20%
- Reduced the radiologists’ overall reading time by up to 90%
Those improvements could have a significant labor impact, considering that Cathay’s rads review 30,000 CXRs every year. They might have an even greater business impact, noting the important role that underwriting accuracy has on policy profitability.
Lunit’s part of the announcement largely focused on its expansion beyond clinical settings, revealing plans to “become the driving force of digital innovation in the global insurance market” and to further expand its business into “various sectors outside the hospital setting.”
The Takeaway
Even if life insurers only require CXRs for a small percentage of their applicants (older people, higher value policies), they still review hundreds of thousands of CXRs each year. That makes insurers an intriguing new market segment for AI vendors, and makes you wonder what other non-clinical AI use cases might exist. However, it might also make radiologists who are still skeptical about AI concerned.
