Skip to content

ADVERTORIAL: Life Insurance Applicants Willing to Use Patient Portals

Advertorial
Life Insurance Applicants Willing to Use Patient Portals

Author

Justin Baker
Associate Vice President, Life Insurance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

June 2026

When life insurance applications get delayed, it’s often attributed to the applicant: an existing condition, incomplete history or the need for additional evidence.

But delays are often less to do with the applicant’s health and more to do with how medical information is gathered.

Three Sources of Friction

Our new research validates what many carriers already experience. Gathering medical information is effort-intensive, time-consuming and difficult to streamline — and remains one of the most persistent sources of friction in the application process.

The research highlights three sources of friction that continue to affect the life insurance application process:

  • Effort is still a major barrier. The amount of required effort is the leading reason for application abandonment, cited by 79% of applicants. This includes describing medical conditions (60%) and collecting information about healthcare providers (56%) to share with a carrier, which are two of the most commonly cited factors. Even among applicants who ultimately complete the process, the level of effort is still a pain point (65%).
  • Application timelines remain a source of friction. Lengthy application timelines remain an unresolved pain point across the industry, and 63% of applicants who abandon the application process cite the time required as a top reason for dropping out. Among those who complete it, 36% identify the process as a pain point — and among those who find the process time unacceptable, 91% say it negatively impacts their satisfaction.
  • Preferences are evolving faster than processes. Applicants prefer patient portals to manage their health information when completing a life insurance application. However, many application workflows still rely on more manual or indirect methods of record collection, which were not designed for speed, visibility or ease.

Despite carriers’ efforts to streamline the application process, these pain points persist. In many cases, improvements in one area introduce trade-offs in another, such as making faster decisions with thinner data or pursuing more complete records at the cost of longer timelines.

Addressing this dynamic requires moving beyond trade-offs to address the underlying issue of how medical information is obtained.

Obtaining Medical Information

One way carriers are obtaining earlier, more complete and decision-ready medical information is by enabling applicants to share medical information directly through patient portals. However, a common industry perception is that applicants are reluctant to use this approach in the life insurance application process.

Our research suggests applicants are not reluctant to share medical information this way, and that it aligns with how they already manage their health data.

Using Patient Portals

For most applicants, accessing health information through a portal is already routine.

  • Eighty-two percent of applicants have patient portal access through their primary care physician.
  • Ninety-one percent of them have accessed it multiple times in the past 12 months.
  • Ninety-three percent have login information readily available.

Further, applicants show willingness to use patient portals as part of the life insurance application process. Among applicants without patient portal access, 82% are likely to set one up for a life insurance application.

Sharing Medical Information

When applicants were given a choice of three methods to share medical information with carriers — patient portal access, medical record exchange, and manual process — patient portal access was the most preferred method.

  • Forty-five percent of applicants preferred portal access over other methods.
  • This preference holds across age groups, including among older applicants, who are often assumed to be less comfortable with digital tools.

Applicants cite three main reasons for their preference, which align directly with the main sources of friction in today’s application process:

  • Ease of providing access to medical records (77%)
  • Completeness of medical information (74%)
  • Speed of medical record retrieval (65%)

Consumer Readiness

Our research shows that applicants are already using patient portals and show a willingness to use them in the life insurance application process.

Consumer-mediated pathways provide one way for carriers to make this shift. With consumer-mediated consent, applicants authorize access to their medical information directly through the patient portals they already use with their healthcare providers. Because applicants typically connect to the providers who know their care best, carriers are more likely to get complete and decision-ready data that can minimize follow-ups, shorten timelines and improve the overall application experience.

By addressing the underlying issue of how medical records are obtained, carriers can address multiple sources of friction at once to mitigate the effort and time of the application process and better align the experience with actual consumer behaviors.

What this looks like in practice

LexisNexis Health Intelligence supports consumer-mediated pathways by helping carriers:

  • Increase access to digital health data. Combining Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-authorized and consumer-mediated approaches can increase total hit rates by 25–30% compared to using HIPAA-authorized routes alone.
  • Bring decision-ready information into the process earlier. More complete, relevant data can enable underwriting decisions without additional evidence (attending physician statement (APS)) 79% of the time.
  • Make medical information easier to review and act on. Purpose-built reports are 30% shorter on average than other electronic health records while retaining the clinical detail underwriters need.

Source: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, internal data


Reimagining Medical Data Sharing in Life Insurance Underwriting, our full summary of research findings, offers detailed insights into application friction, consumer expectations and how carriers can better align their processes with consumer behavior. Register to download the full report.

 

Did you accomplish the goal of your visit to our site?

Yes No