• Fragmented UK health data infrastructure slows underwriting and claims, increases costs and weakens the customer experience for protection insurers.
• AI and initiatives like the Single Patient Record can help, but they cannot fix poor access to trusted, consented health data.
• Lalu Hub helps close this gap by giving insurers structured access to the medical evidence they need to make faster decisions.

Every year, GP practices across the UK spend hundreds of thousands of hours processing medical reports for insurers, employers, and solicitors, time pulled directly away from patient care. Our founder and CEO, Richard Freeman, has written about why this isn’t just an NHS problem. It’s an insurance one too.

In a new piece for Protection Reporter, Richard argues that the UK’s fragmented health data landscape, split across more than 200 NHS trusts and 6,000+ GP practices, creates a cost that gets quietly absorbed rather than properly addressed. For protection insurers specifically, that fragmentation shows up as slower underwriting and claims decisions, higher operational cost per request, and a weaker customer experience at exactly the moments it matters most: the point of sale, and the point of a claim.

“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 Founder & CEO)

The piece also looks at where the industry goes from here by discussing: 

• Why initiatives like the proposed Single Patient Record won’t solve this on their own,
• Why AI can speed up analysis but can’t fix underlying infrastructure issues,
• Why the FCA’s recent work on AI governance and its ongoing Pure Protection Market Study both point toward the same conclusion: technology only helps when it sits on top of trusted, consented, well-governed data.

This is exactly the problem Lalu Hub was built to solve. Instead of GP reports sitting in a queue behind a clinical list for weeks, Lalu gives insurers consented, structured access to the medical evidence they need, curated to what was actually requested, so decisions don’t stall waiting on information that already exists.

If this sounds familiar, it’s worth reading Richard’s take in full: Health data infrastructure isn’t working, and insurers are footing the bill

To see how Lalu Hub addresses this for protection insurers, visit our Lalu Hub page, or get in touch us here to talk through what it could mean for your team.