I don’t know what you have to do now but you used to just have two doctors certificates, without really any reason much. So are funds moving towards collecting more information so in the future we will be able to look at factors such as mental health? Nick Galanakis: That’s definitely what we would like to see. Whether its insured or uninsured, we can actually track it back to a specific condition at the time that it related to. Sean Scallan: Nick, can you just talk us through the timeframes on CURE. Nick Galanakis: In the next two to three weeks we will actually start that project. We believe the project will take somewhere around twelve months from beginning to end. The outcome of the actual project will actually be several reports. The first will be a generic report providing an overview of what we see across the whole industry. The gaps, deficiencies, duplications and the like.

The second will be a customised report on that for each participant, the funds and insurers. Sean Scallan: Moving on to the second guest speaker, we will go on to Lisa Munsie, executive manager of wholesale risk business relationships at Comminsure. And the topic is, why should the claims process around mental health conditions be improved. Lisa Munsie: I’ve been involved in the Superfriend project for the last year or so now. It’s been a collective input from a number of insurers, funds and administrators, all keen to work at improving the end to end process for the treatment of mental illness claims. I think overall the main problem is it isn’t an end to end process. So we’ve worked very closely with Superpartners on a case management process, that Amalia Faba will talk about shortly, where they’ve got the actual case manager sitting within the administrator.

The thing we need to focus be honest about is it doesn’t matter where the qualified people sit, but it needs to be somewhere where claimants of mental illness can actually speak to somebody that has the expertise and ability to listen to their concerns and enable the action of their claim. Most insurers will not have a different claim form for someone that has a back injury to someone that has a mental illness. So these are basic type things. Similarly, the experts they get to deal with cases may not have the technical expertise to actually deal with patients with mental illness and to assess the claims. We see quite a few generic issues that continue to arise – the percentage of ‘stress’ claims we still see coming, which isn’t actually a diagnosis, so it’s very hard for us to look at proactive case management strategies when we see these generic labels coming in.