9December 2016present additional opportunities to sell needed coverage or mitigate risk for them. Additionally, in the health insurance business, data is being collected to provide the customer with additional services, along with creating data points that can be analyzed by the health insurance provider. Typically, your physician orders tests, reviews the results with you and orders prescriptions. The physician in turn forwards the results with notes to the insurance company. They can now monitor your prescription pickups and renewals, and send out reminders to patients about how they may improve their heath situation. These types of data points can provide an abundance of information to help health insurance companies provide better services to their customer. It also gives them better data to calculate a premium. I think we will start seeing health carriers use mobile and wearable device information, which can monitor a person's habits and provide ongoing assessment of their lifestyle and activity. In turn the providers can then possibly allow customers to work to reduce their premiums on a sliding scale by showing that they are improving on their unhealthy behaviors. While we do see some carriers starting to use big data, as an industry we have just started down the path of using this data.At the Leavitt Group, we have always consolidated data as an organization. Now we are starting to use better tools to analyze the data and determining what other information we may have that can be useful to our overall goal of finding additional opportunities to assist our customers and finding markets that work for us. Just like many others, in our industry we see the importance of using Big Data not only as a sales tool, but also as a service tool to our customers. One of the things I see that could help the insurance industry as a whole, is the sharing of data and finding an efficient way to accomplish that. One of the biggest hurdles we face in doing that is connectivity from carriers to brokers. Once we can overcome that hurdle, the sharing of data can evolve to the next step. We also are starting to see the insurance market evolve. Consumers are looking for different ways to understand and purchase insurance in a convenient way. One of the innovations that we are not yet utilizing to the full extent is mobile and wearable devices. I expect that one day we will see a service connected to an app that can mine the data that is selected by the consumer that can help cover risks that may arise. How would this work? Let's say they book some type of travel, that service could be mining personal data (emails, social media, calendars, etc.) in real time and offer coverage for that trip. Or maybe they make a purchase, and again that real time data mining would be able to offer coverage to cover the risk right from app. From my perspective Big Data and data analytics will be driving our industry forward, the best way we can get there is by providing useful tools to the consumers which also provide information data points. Customers will not mind giving up data if we are transparent about what information we are asking for and what value they are getting back from it. The reality is big data is all around us, we just have to find ways to start using it. Scott HannaganThe reality is big data is all around us, we just have to find ways to start using it
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