Insurance / Life insurance
Aviva: Summarising medical reports for protection underwriting
- Company
- Aviva
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- In use from
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
In Aviva's individual protection business, underwriters had to read the full medical report from a patient's doctor when assessing an application. The company said these reports sometimes run to more than 90 pages and are extremely time consuming to read. Aviva said that having to work through lengthy digital medical reports had been a shared challenge across the industry in protection underwriting for some time.
Technology and data
The company built a tool that uses generative AI to analyse medical reports and turn them into short summaries. It filters out irrelevant detail from long reports and surfaces the key information an underwriter needs. Reading the summary and making the final underwriting decision stays with the underwriter. Aviva said the tool went through eighteen months of testing and controls and had processed 1,000 cases in an active test phase. Its November 2025 release announced that the rollout to underwriting teams would start on 28 November, and its March 2026 release confirmed that the tool had launched for individual life insurance applications in November 2025. In March 2026 the company re-used and extended the same capability for individual critical illness applications, and said it had validated summarisation quality and accuracy across a wider range of conditions and risk factors.
Results
Aviva said the tool has cut the time underwriters spend reviewing each case by around half. The company said it was the first of its kind in the protection market when it launched for individual life insurance applications in November 2025, and that it is the first insurer to bring the technology to the critical illness market. With this extension the insurer said it can now summarise most individual protection applications where a medical report is required. It added that the current capability also covers post application auditing and that the next focus is summarisation for income protection.
Limits and open questions
The source does not say which model or which vendor technology is used. It also does not give the measurement period or the number of cases behind the figure of around half, nor any measured accuracy number for the summaries.
Sources
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.