Disability claims rarely resolve on a single medical record pull. A long-term disability case can stretch across months or years, with medical evidence requested, reviewed, and requested again as a claimant’s condition changes. Add in records that come back late and records that duplicate what’s already been reviewed, and review time and operational costs start compounding well before an analyst ever gets to a decision.
“Cost has always been a top priority for these teams, because every record they order is money spent before a claim is even decided,” says Andrew Simpson, ReleasePoint’s AVP & Senior Account Executive for Life and Disability Accounts, who has spent nearly two decades working with disability claims organizations. “In the last few years, there has been an increased awareness of the need for document quality, and teams are becoming increasingly open to rethinking the process altogether.”
That shift is the gap most vendors haven’t caught up to.
They Need the Full Answer, Not Most of It
Ask a disability claims analyst what slows a case down most, and turnaround time is only part of the answer. A slow retrieval is a real cost on its own, but pair that delay with a record that comes back incomplete, and the two compound into the kind of time suck that actually stalls a decision.
“They’re waiting on a key piece of information to make a call, and it’s sitting with the medical record vendor,” Simpson says. “Even a fast turnaround doesn’t help much if what comes back is only eighty percent of what they need. That missing twenty percent might be what actually enables them to make a determination.”
That gap shouldn’t reach an analyst’s desk in the first place. At ReleasePoint, workflows are built around quality assurance and completeness, not just speed. The intent is to catch a missing record before it’s ever delivered, not after an analyst is already mid-review. When that quality check doesn’t exist, the fallout shows up downstream. If a vendor misses something an analyst specifically flagged on the request form, the analyst is often left to chase it down themselves, sometimes going straight to the provider.
“That kind of defeats the whole purpose of using a third party,” Simpson says. “If that’s happening, something broke down in the process before the file ever reached them.”
A retrieval partner’s job isn’t just to deliver documents. It’s to quality assure a complete answer on the first pass, including the details an analyst specifically called out, so gaps get caught before delivery instead of discovered mid-review.
Their Cases Don’t End After One Pull
Life insurance underwriting is largely a single, wide-net record request. Disability claims rarely work that way.
“With long-term disability especially, they need updates,” Simpson says. “They want to see if there’s been any change in the medical condition, the outcome, the person’s ability to return to work. So they order records in January, then reorder in August to see what’s changed.”
The problem is what comes back. If a vendor treats every reorder as a fresh, full pull, the analyst ends up re-reviewing records they already read six months earlier.
“If the records vendor doesn’t scrub it or reduce the date range for them, now they have to go back through all those pages again,” Simpson says.
Carriers are often legally required to review whatever a vendor sends, even if it’s far more than they asked for. A vendor that doesn’t manage scope isn’t just slow. It’s actively creating rework.
Behavioral Health Records Come With Their Own Rules
Mental and behavioral health documentation shows up constantly in disability files, and it comes with rules most general medical record requests don’t.
“We need to make sure the patient’s HIPAA authorization is compliant, and specifically allows the release of mental health records,” Simpson says. “If it doesn’t, a lot of providers will refuse to release them at all.”
Even with a compliant authorization, psychiatric and behavioral health providers will often hand over an abstract instead of the full record. That triggers another round of back-and-forth. Analysts without a vendor who knows how to navigate these cases absorb the delay themselves, and sometimes end up explaining to a claimant after the fact why a request stalled.
“This is a workflow reality for every carrier,” Simpson says. “A good retrieval partner gets ahead of it, working with these providers before the request goes out, not scrambling after it comes back short.”
A Partner Who Innovates With You
Retrieval is the foundation, but the best partners are also helping carriers innovate toward what’s next, in ways that actually fit how their organizations work.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) Adoption Is Growing, On Carriers’ Terms
“We’re seeing more openness to EHR than we used to,” Simpson says. “We have disability carriers using it throughout their claims organization now, and they love it. They get records back quickly, and they’re not getting back as much extra information, because the request itself is much narrower.”
EHR isn’t replacing traditional retrieval. But for carriers with well-defined record needs, it’s becoming a faster, more targeted option worth building into the mix.
AI Summaries Can Unlock a Faster Decision Path
Hundreds of pages of clinical notes, lab results, and treatment history often sit between a claims analyst and a decision. That’s exactly the environment tools like RP Insights were built for.
“By leveraging RP Insights summaries, we’ve seen clients cut their review time roughly in half,” Simpson says. “For the teams open to trying out new tools, AI summaries embedded into existing workflows can make a huge impact on review times. It’s the difference between spending hours hunting for the right detail or spending a few minutes confirming what the summary surfaced.”
Purpose-built AI summaries, built specifically for medical records and insurance use cases, surface the insights that actually drive a decision, cutting hours of manual review out of every case. “AI doesn’t lose focus on page 800,” says Lindsey Zipoy, ReleasePoint’s Director of Business Innovation, “which is exactly what makes it useful for flagging what deserves a closer look.”
That same design discipline is what makes the output trustworthy, not just fast. “A consumer AI tool has no guardrails around what it should and shouldn’t infer, and it isn’t architected to keep one person’s data from ever touching another’s,” Zipoy says. Every RP Insights output links back to the exact location in the source document, which matters when a decision can be appealed or litigated.
Structured Data Is the Layer Beyond Summaries
A summary helps someone read faster. Structured data feeds an entire workflow.
Structured data turns medical record retrieval from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. When records arrive as searchable, tagged data instead of unindexed PDFs, analysts can pull specific diagnoses, treatment dates, or provider notes in seconds instead of paging through hundreds of scanned documents. That speeds up eligibility reviews, surfaces inconsistencies between medical history and claim narratives faster, and frees analysts to spend more time on judgment calls and less on document hunting.
For disability claims specifically, where determinations often hinge on tracking functional limitations across multiple providers and time periods, structured data makes it possible to cross-reference records systematically instead of relying on memory or notes. The result is fewer processing delays, more consistent decisions, and a better experience for claimants waiting on an outcome.
Tools like ReleasePoint’s MIDAS convert unstructured pages into that kind of human-validated, structured data, built to plug directly into a carrier’s own systems.
The One Thing Analysts Rarely Get: A Partner Who Owns the Problem With Them
Every point above traces back to one root issue: most record vendors treat the relationship as a series of transactions instead of a shared workflow.
“With real estate, they say the most important thing is location, location, location,” Simpson says. “With claims teams, it’s collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. Medical evidence is the central part of the adjudication process, so analysts need a partner who’s actually going to look at their end-to-end workflow with them. Maybe it’s tweaking the record request form. Maybe it’s a two- or three-day change on our side that adds up over hundreds of cases.”
That kind of partnership doesn’t come from a sales relationship alone. It requires client experience teams and a business innovation function actually sitting down with claims organizations to diagnose where the workflow is losing time, and then building toward a fix.
“It’s not just a salesperson talking to these folks,” Simpson says. “It’s a team effort, and once we get in a room and go through their workflow together, that’s when they realize we’re solving problems with them, not just filling their record requests.”