"When access to health data is difficult, someone pays the price, and right now, it's the doctors, consumers, and insurers themselves footing the bill."
- Richard Freeman - Lalu
Each year, GP practices across the UK process millions of medical reports for third parties such as insurers, employers and solicitors. This non-NHS work diverts GPs’ time away from patient care. Just one such type of report, the travel insurance claim form, is reported to cost GPs 111,000 hours a year.
That example reflects a much broader challenge for the insurance market, and particularly the protection insurance sector. The need to assess an individual's health at the point of sale or claim underpins the pricing mechanism and risk assessment methodology.
However, obtaining medical evidence for this purpose remains unnecessarily slow, expensive, and labour-intensive. It places additional pressure on already stretched clinicians while creating avoidable cost and delay for insurers. Each request can cost between £27 and £104, sometimes even more, as there’s no agreed-upon set limit. Too often, it’s shrugged off as an inevitable cost, something to be absorbed without question.
The underlying issue is that health data in this country is fragmented in ways that would be considered unacceptable for any other critical infrastructure.
In England, patient information is held across more than 200 NHS trusts and over 6,000 GP practices, each acting as a separate data controller. Much of this data is embedded in legacy systems that were never designed to talk to one another.
When access to health data is difficult, someone pays the price, and right now, it's the doctors, consumers, and insurers themselves footing the bill. For insurers, that fragmentation translates directly into slower decisions, higher operational costs, and a poorer customer experience.
While debates about improving the UK's fragmented health data landscape are ongoing, they rarely extend beyond the NHS itself. Yet fragmented health data is not just an NHS issue. Trusted health information has become critical infrastructure for the wider economy, and nowhere is that more evident than in insurance. Underwriting accuracy, claims validation, fraud detection and fair pricing all depend on the right information reaching the right people at the right time.
And yet every one of those report requests still sits in a queue behind a GP's clinical list. Claims stall for weeks rather than hours. For a protection insurer, every additional day spent waiting for medical evidence increases the risk of prospective customers abandoning the application process before cover is issued. At the other end of the customer journey, it can also mean claimants waiting unnecessarily for a critical illness payout.
This isn’t simply an administrative inconvenience. It sits directly beneath the promise an insurer makes to a customer at the point of sale, and it shapes the customer's experience of the brand when that promise is tested.
Fortunately, the data already exists. The challenge is enabling trusted, timely access to it when decisions need to be made. At its core, it's an infrastructure problem: a lack of a standard digital pipeline between GPs and insurers means that manual, request-by-request data extraction is the norm. The technology to solve this already exists, but it must be implemented in a way that builds trust through patient consent, governance, and appropriate clinical oversight.
National initiatives such as the proposed Single Patient Record could improve health data access, but they won’t automatically solve insurers’ challenges. Faster access alone will not be enough. Insurers will still require secure systems to request and receive medical evidence efficiently at the point of underwriting or claims. AI can also be used to speed up analysis, but it can't compensate for poor infrastructure. Faster data processing is only valuable when the underlying data is accurate, well-curated, and managed within robust clinical governance frameworks.
The FCA’s work also reinforces that point. While its recent review into AI in financial services describes AI as a "defining force" that will reshape how firms operate and how consumers make financial decisions, the regulator has been equally clear that stronger governance, oversight and system-wide coordination will be essential if those benefits are to be realised safely.
READ MORE: Mental health referrals double between Millennials and Gen Z
At the same time, the FCA’s ongoing Pure Protection Market Study is examining how the protection market can deliver better consumer outcomes, including improvements to claims experiences and wider market efficiency. Together, these two pieces of work point in the same direction: technology alone isn’t enough. AI can process data faster, but without trusted infrastructure, clear consent, and clinical governance, it simply accelerates errors.
There is a legitimate concern that pushing more health data through the system will erode patient trust, but the opposite is true when it is done properly. When patients understand how their data is used, why, and by whom, trust is more likely to increase.
Capturing the appropriate consent digitally at the point of underwriting or claim means permission can be acted on immediately, rather than simply recorded. By retrieving only the data relevant to a specific claim, underwriters can shift from reviewing every case to focusing only on technical exceptions.
The barriers are no longer technical. The capability exists. The opportunity is real. What remains is the commitment to move beyond legacy processes and build trusted, connected health data infrastructure.
The current system serves no one well. GP practices waste millions of hours processing health data, insurers pay for an inefficient risk assessment process, and customers are left to deal with the financial and medical consequences of avoidable delays.
That doesn’t have to remain the status quo. It means investing in systems that securely request and receive relevant health data, capture consent digitally at source, and retrieve only the information needed for each decision. Health data is now critical infrastructure, not just for healthcare, but for the wider economy.
