Risk management is foundational to the insurance industry at large. Not only as a means to ensure the pricing integrity of insurance products, but most importantly, to continue to achieve and maintain safer, healthier environments for all. Innovation in this space should be recognized, encouraged and celebrated. To that end, we celebrate RiskMD!
RiskMD holds one of (if not the) only patents specific to PEO. This patented business intelligence platform organizes insurance-related data in a proprietary way to empower risk managers and insurance executives to completely change the way they approach decision making.
Risk managers and insurance executives spend countless hours poring over numbers in search of opportunities to mitigate losses and increase profitability. This requires many hours of tedious work, compiling and deciphering mountains data using multiple complex tools, and the experience and instincts to find actionable insights.
RiskMD completely reshapes this process. The technology seamlessly automates data aggregation and integration to provide clear and meaningful insights with detailed and impactful visualizations. It gives users the ability to schedule recurring reports for quick and easy insights on demand, while also allowing for more advanced users to dig deep into the numbers and find the most granular of opportunities.
What makes RiskMD unique? Where did the concept come from?
Risk MD is an insurance data analytics tool that was built with the goal of changing the way the industry uses data to understand loss ratios and maximize profitability for any given insurance transaction. It’s a system and method for the valuation, acquisition, and management of insurance data. The concept was developed by Paul Hughes, the Founder and CEO of RiskMD, with the idea of bringing the mentality of stock trading analytics to the insurance world.
This system follows a patented process that uses a common identifier, the Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) to efficiently and effectively aggregate data in a new and powerful way. The process makes it possible to funnel data into the system without the need for labor-intensive manual input.
The use of FEIN also enables a more precise normalization of the data so that it can be more easily manipulated. This allows users to easily drill down to a deeper level for more impactful insights.
Another unique feature of the tool is that it’s designed to produce insights, rather than requiring users to find the insights themselves. Without RiskMD, risk managers and insurance executives have to dedicate countless hours to building and manipulating spreadsheets and pivot tables, then try to search the resulting data points to verify whatever insights are available to be found. RiskMD compiles the data much more efficiently and can be pre-programmed to surface the most important insights automatically, presenting them visually through the use of graphs, tables, and charts.
Whether risk managers and insurance executives are using it to manipulate data in real-time on their own or relying on custom reports that are delivered automatically, those using RiskMD have a competitive advantage over those who don’t.
How is RiskMD relevant to core concerns of risk managers?
One of the most critically important concerns for insurance executives is to maintain profitability across a book of business. They manage the total cost of risk, which can come from claims paid, or dollar values that are paid internally within a deductible limit, and additional costs that aren’t easily quantified, like the value of opportunity costs missed. Their ability to do this depends heavily on using data to gain an understanding of which accounts might create profitability issues. Without knowing which accounts are presenting exposure points and fueling losses, a risk manager cannot effectively manage them. This leads to reactionary behaviors rather than proactive ones. Minor “hot spots” can become major loss leaders.
It gives the ability to quickly and easily see loss ratios for each account or exposure in their book of business, in real-time, through visualizations. If profitability is the macro problem, RiskMD is a tool that helps take a granular look to find the micro issues that cause that macro problem. This prevention-based approach maximizes profitability.
How is RiskMD effective in solving one or more problems in the risk management process?
Managing risk effectively and profitably relies on finding and addressing loss leaders proactively. To do this, risk managers face the problem of compiling and deciphering large quantities of data. This process is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and typically requires a deep knowledge of multiple data manipulation tools. Even with all the tools and manpower, the problem is often compounded when insights are unfound, like a needle in a haystack.
At its core, RiskMD is a risk assessment and analysis tool. It simplifies the data evaluation process and allows C-Level Executives and Risk Managers to discover key insights that help them make better business decisions. Using visualizations for risk identification makes insights easier to find and understand at all levels. Delivering performance metrics in real time through visualizations ensures that the internal and external stakeholders of an insurance transaction can always “keep score.”
How is RiskMD presented to risk managers to ensure ease of understanding and use.
RiskMD is an incredibly robust data analysis tool. The sheer volume of information and insights that it provides can be overwhelming. With that in mind the platform was specifically designed to make those insights as easy to access as possible using Tableau Software, which is the industry standard for user-friendly data visualization.
Using the automatic data-input process and the interpretations made possible by the proprietary algorithms, RiskMD delivers insights to the user or insurance executive in the form of graphs, tables, and customizable gauges. These visualizations are designed to make understanding the insights simple and easy enough for any user to understand. They are color-coded in a green-to-red, “stoplight” method that makes quickly understanding areas of potential risk easier.
RiskMD provides automated reports that can be built once and then scheduled for direct delivery at the desired interval. This allows a more hands-off approach in which the most important indicators are delivered directly to the user’s desk, ensuring consistent oversight.
For users with a higher degree of data acumen, RiskMD allows them to pull various levers and manipulate data to gain deep and precise insights that would otherwise be extremely time-consuming to uncover. This ability to “slice and dice” information provides a level of understanding that makes a user’s ability to mitigate potential losses invaluable.
What results and objectives are achieved by RiskMD in a risk management setting.
Benchmarks are instrumental in providing key insights using data. RiskMD houses more than 100,000 claims files and exposure data for more than 20,000 client companies. This cache of data allows RiskMD users to benchmark against RiskMD proprietary data, as well as industry data. That ability to benchmark against the proprietary data became incredibly useful during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The insurance industry cycles through exposure, premium, and claims data on a period of about 12-18 months when accounting for audit periods. RiskMD cycles through this data on a bi-monthly basis due to data ingestion from its expansive PEO clientele, which report on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. When the global Coronavirus pandemic shut down the economy and upended the industry, NCCI, the preeminent Workers’ Compensation Bureau, contacted RiskMD for insights on how COVID was affecting claims and payroll. RiskMD was the only known source that could provide real-time insights on jobs and job-related COVID claims. RiskMD provided NCCI with important insights as to how COVID affected jobs and payroll nationwide by quantifying claims incurred versus the reduced premiums collected. This accurate capture of loss ratio was simply not available anywhere else due to the proprietary source of “pay-as-you-go” payroll exposure information.
