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Evidence-based Underwriting
A wide range of insurance products can be assessed using CLUE. This includes mortality covers and accidental covers as well as income protection and disability covers. It also includes more regionally focused products such as Critical Illness, Long Term Care, and various types of health insurance.
CLUE contains underwriting guidelines for the full range of risks relevant to underwriting. These range from medical risk, occupational risk, and pursuits risk to foreign travel and financial risk.
Any assessment of risk in CLUE is based on up-to-date and concise evidence. Behind the scenes of CLUE is a multi-disciplinary team of experts dedicated to constantly improving and further developing these guidelines by looking at every risk from different perspectives, most importantly medical, actuarial, and legal.
Currently, CLUE includes over 10,000 medical conditions, over 8,000 occupations, about 500 pursuits, and over 200 countries; new entries are added with every update.
Updates to CLUE are published regularly. These updates add new types of risk and, by reviewing the guidelines, they reflect developments in risk perception and the most current evidence. In addition, we constantly strive to improve the user experience of underwriters working with the manual.
CLUE offers a growing selection of calculators to accelerate and facilitate the underwriting process.
In the medical section, calculators are used to support a very granular assessment of particularly complex diseases. These include, among others, a depression calculator, calculators for malignant and benign tumours, an HIV infection calculator, and a cardiovascular risk factor calculator.
These calculators account for the interactions of the included risk factors, avoiding double counting on the one hand and detecting unfavourable combinations and “red flags” on the other hand, thus enabling underwriting decisions that are both risk-adequate and fair.
In the non-medical sections, calculators can be found for every type of risk: an occupations calculator that provides underwriting loadings as well as occupational classes; a travel calculator that assesses risk associated with travel but also compares the risk levels of country of policy issue vs. country of travel; and a financial risk calculator that facilitates the calculation of adequate sums insured.
As part of the underwriting guidelines, CLUE contains background information on the different types of risk. These are intended to provide the user with a quick overview of the risk to be assessed.
Additional supportive content includes questionnaires designed to collect the information required for the assessment and exclusion clauses, both available in all sections of the manual.
CLUE is currently available in the following languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian and Spanish
CLUE’s intuitive design and intelligent search function facilitates quick access to the desired rating pages and calculators. In the medical section, underwriters can choose between entering a search term or the respective ICD‑10 code to get to the medical condition to be assessed.
In CLUE, ratings for all available benefit types are presented either in rating tables that are cleanly structured and easily readable, or in risk calculators. All assessments contained in the rating tables and the calculators can be easily collected with a simple click in a rating sheet. This functionality of CLUE enables the underwriter to have all information related to a case at a glance – along with the specific ratings and the factors that have determined the ratings are related ICD‑10 codes, basic applicant information, and additional notes – and to store and export it.
A helpful Notes functionality allows companies to record their individual comments or company-specific guidelines on any page of the CLUE manual. These notes can be viewed only by underwriters of the respective companies. User administration Companies can administrate users within their team autonomously by using the Manual Administration section of the CLUE manual.
Previous versions of the CLUE guidelines can be accessed easily by each authorized user of CLUE to comprehend past underwriting decisions, as can be required, for example, in the event of a claim.
The specific features of your business will determine the effectiveness of this tool and reports. Please contact one of our representatives if you have any questions.
For more information, please contact Annika Schilling.
