We think that would be very valuable for funds, for insurers and for mental health practitioners, so that’s the other project that we’re working on. So this first one, we’ve asked for the insurers to go and do some work on that, and representatives from Hanover Re and CommInsure have been coordinating those efforts . Sean Scallan: I think that leads very nicely into our first guest speaker of the day, Nick Galanakis who is senior consultant at IFS Insurance Broking. Nick is going to talk about the current process for handling mental health-related claims. Nick Galanakis: I’ve put together a brief flyer that will give an overview of our CURE initiative, which stands for Claims and Underwriting Re-Engineering [Note: the CURE flyer can be obtained by contacting Galanakis at ngalanakis@ mail.ifs.net.au ] It’s looking at current procedures for claims processing, and effectively strengthening those. There will definitely be some synergies with respect to a number of initiatives that IFF are running with at the moment regarding mental health, because we will be looking at all causes of TPD claims, and all claims that result due to mental health type conditions. CURE is a broad-based, industry-wide initiative.

It’s effectively targeted, identifying the current best practice for claims processing both in Australia and internationally… The project will consider alternative processing methods, because there’s quite a bit of empirical evidence to suggest that the member experience of lodging claims is not that great. Now, of late we have seen some significant market growth, particularly in industry funds. We’ve seen premiums increase by 20 percent in the years 2007 to 2008, we’ve seen a lot of product development aimed at making the product more accessible to members. We’ve seen a lot of funds being very proactive in terms of increasing default levels of the cover, to automatically provide additionally high cover for members and the like… So these are all positives, but I guess the Achilles Heel of it all is the member’s experience with respect to the underwriting process, in addition to when they lodge their claims. In the flyer you’ll see that the average industry pe- riod in terms of getting a resolution on TPD claims is approximately 170 days.

We appreciate there’ll be some claims that are a much shorter period and there are some that take many years to assess and find the final determination. But the importance of this statistic here, is when you actually add the fact that there is a six month qualifying period on a typical TPD product, on average members are waiting at least six months. Actually that statistic doesn’t also take into account the time that the trustee will review the claim to make sure it meets the conditions of release as dictated by the funds trustees. So the time would actually be longer than that. But this is to provide an indication generally of what we’re seeing in the industry. Peter Gebert: Those TPD claims, are they claims that have been admitted or are they claims that have been admitted and declined? Nick Galanakis: It’s a combination of both.