BALTIMORE, MD / ACCESSWIRE / September 2, 2022 / Invive is a months-old startup that helps underwriters personalize life insurance policies according to the unique health stats of customers. Combining AI with the emerging science of healthy aging, Invive offers a platform that both improves the precision of risk scoring and gamifies the underwriting process for customers.
About Invive
Diego Tanton, a Johns Hopkins alum and past researcher at the National Institute on Aging, says he started Invive with the goal of using the science of aging to address a poignant issue in the life insurance industry, one which was brought to light even more by the COVID-19 pandemic. The “need gap” for life insurance, or the number of individuals who don’t have adequate mortality coverage, has grown to 40% of the total market and is especially pronounced among young adults entering the market for the first time.
At the same time, Tanton noticed that there has been a growing fascination among consumers, enabled by Big Data, to track and quantify their health. Examples range from personalized genomics kits to activity and sleep logging devices. Quantifying the “biological age” of customers-or their true age reflected by their biology, rather than the calendar-serves as a recent manifestation of this trend, an application which Tanton reasoned might help catalyze life insurance engagement and address this need gap. The team at Invive developed an algorithm and platform that underwriters can use to get a read on the biological age of customers, improving risk assessment and also feeding into the health fascination of customers.
The Science of Aging
Driven by a rapidly aging population and a growing interest in personal wellness, the science of healthy aging has gained increased recognition in popular culture and the media in recent years. As a research program, the science of aging sets the following aims: (1) to come to understand the normal processes that underlie biological aging and (2) to devise more effective treatments for diseases such as cancer, dementia, or atherosclerosis by targeting aging directly.
Pioneering work in the field of epigenetics popularized the idea of a “biological clock” that ticks away as a person ages, and from this derived the idea of a person’s biological age. The crucial insight here is that an individual’s biological age can be different from their calendar age, where this difference is based on a number of factors affecting the person’s health. Tanton gives an example:
Let’s say Sallie is a 65-year-old who runs marathons and hikes every weekend. Sallie is probably going [to] be biologically younger than her twin, Mae, who lives a mostly sedentary lifestyle. Using biomarkers collected from the two twins, we might calculate Sallie’s biological age to be 55, whereas Mae’s biological age might be 70. . . . if it turns out that we should really treat Sallie as 55 for actuarial purposes and Mae as 70, this is something that life insurers would want [to] know about.
Consumer interest in the science of healthy aging forms part of a rapidly growing market segment that emphasizes personalized health tracking and quantification. Riding this wave, a number of emerging companies claim to evaluate the biological age of customers with different health metrics. What sets Invive apart is that it is among the first to embed mortality protection into such a service, allowing customers to reap the rewards of their healthy living in the form of lower premium payments.
How it Works
During the underwriting process for life insurance, clinical health markers are collected either from electronic health records or from a scheduled exam, which helps the insurer assess how to price an applicant’s policy. When an underwriter reviews an applicant’s lab results, they’re mostly scanning for signs of disease.
“This traditional process leaves a lot of valuable information on the table,” says Tanton.
Using the collected health data, Invive applies its proprietary algorithm to make an evaluation of the biological age of the applicant. The algorithm captures the more nuanced ways in which these molecular signatures change over the lifespan, allowing the startup to provide insurers with a more high-resolution and holistic picture of an applicant’s health that can supplement traditional underwriting.
Tanton specifies that Invive’s formulation of biological age is both thoroughly grounded in the literature and specifically designed to reflect the life tables used by underwriters.
“If an individual has a biological age of 55, they can and should be treated as a 55-year-old for medical underwriting, even if they are 65,” says Tanton.
By having the biological age of 55, according to the company’s algorithm, an individual should have the mortality risk of a 55-year-old of their particular build and demographic.
Invive’s evaluation of biological age takes into account factors such as heart and liver health, blood electrolyte balance, and sugar metabolism. Importantly, customers can improve these aspects of their health over time, and thus improve their biological age, by making changes to their diet and lifestyle.
Invive’s algorithm for evaluating biological age was trained and tested using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an ongoing government-run study on a large, representative sample of children and adults in the U.S. The algorithm derives its estimates using 30 years of data (approximately 1.1 million total data points) on the relationship between molecular biomarkers and age-related mortality.
Not only does this improved resolution help mitigate risk for life insurers and improve their loss ratios, but it also creates a much more engaging interaction with the consumer.
“The normal feeling of going through medical underwriting is like taking a test that you can’t study for,” says Tanton.
Thinking about life insurance can also be demoralizing and many people put it off for this reason, which helps create the need gap mentioned above. By challenging customers to save money based on their health, Invive is looking to gamify life insurance, increasing engagement among existing customers and attracting new ones by making the product more marketable for agents and direct writers alike.
“We’re looking to break the stereotype that life insurance is a product that must be sold and not bought,” declares Tanton.
The startup is looking to provide a captivating and modern touchpoint for consumers, especially for younger folks who might kick the decision to purchase life insurance down the road.
To establish this point of contact with customers, Invive’s algorithm is embedded into a platform that can be used by underwriters and which prepares easily accessible biological age and health reports for end-consumers.
“We have a working MVP,” says Tanton, adding that the company is now looking to partner with carriers to perform pilot tests.
“Our ultimate aim is to create a seamless integration between mortality protection and molecular health and wellness, attracting a larger market and getting customers the valuable coverage they need.”
Learn more about Invive on their website; you can also contact them to participate in their development by sending a message.
CONTACT:
Contact Name: Diego Tanton
Business/Company Name: Invive
Phone Number: 443-442-4025
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://invive.io/
SOURCE: Invive
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