Legal & General has sped up its application process for medical insurance by making immediate decisions on 90 per cent of applications received to its tele underwriting team.

This figure represents a 24 per cent increase over the past four months as Legal & General has made continued efforts to improve the application process for customers through increased use of tele medical interviews rather than requesting GP reports, which would require further underwriting.

Nurses and underwriters gather information about patients during the application process on over 50 specific conditions, such as depression and hypertension, as well as anything ‘out of the ordinary’.

Commenting, Russ Whitworth, underwriting and claims director for Legal & General medical insurance, said: “We’ve built up real expertise in tele medical interviewing, and estimate we will have made over 50,000 calls by the end of the year.”

Explaining the reasons behind the increased turnover, Mr Whitworth added: “We’ve also in-sourced our ‘little t’ tele underwriting team and tweaked our processes to get better information from the call. This means that for nine out of ten clients our underwriters are able to look at that information and make a decision straight away. We’re also able to give standard rates to the majority of our clients – over 80 per cent.”

© Fair Investment Company Ltd