Senior Living Facility Warning Flags

Nursing homes have been devastated by the pandemic, accounting for more than a third of COVID-19 deaths nationwide. That makes assessing the risks from senior living facilities, which have become very difficult for brokers to place, even more important.

Underwriting technology company Convr has developed a risk score that can flag when an outbreak is likely. Formerly known as DataCubes, Convr uses artificial intelligence to assess factors such as total number of residents, current PPE supplies, staffing, and the age and size of the facilities. The model takes in data from a variety of sources and looks at more than 14,000 facilities, using the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network.

“We’re collecting information about them, everything we can, and letting the machine learning algorithm help decide what in this universe of information is most meaningful for forecasting future outbreaks of COVID,” Convr chief analytics officer John Henry says. “We’ve observed the model being very good at quantifying the risk and giving the end user, the insurers, some insight into upcoming risks for these facilities.”

Among those insights is a high-risk flag that indicates when an outbreak is likely at a facility.

“The number of COVID-19 cases for those facilities that get that high-risk flag, in the next week, the total is 17 times greater than those that don’t,” Henry says.

The risk scores are part of Convr Insider, a complementary tool for carriers that provides answers to key underwriting questions relating to COVID-19. While the risk factors would be different for different diseases, the risk scores could be adapted for future pandemics.