"It's not your father's Oldsmobile" was the popular televised ad slogan for the long established automaker's promotional campaign some years ago. A new generation of buyers was demanding a more modern approach to the traditional, staid and venerable Olds, and the manufacturer was trying to draw those new consumers into their showrooms with a different product from the familiar ones of generations past.    
The New York automobile insurance scene today is also "not your father's insurance market, although many multi generational agencies will have a Dad or Mom who's seen it all yet stays up to date with all that's going on. The wisest among producers know that those approaching auto insurance the old-fashioned way are destined to miss out on the new auto insurance consumer, who is generally more insurable today—and more demanding—than a decade ago. These new buyers are now getting used to a market that is more competitive, less controlled by regulation and more accommodating to the needs of the auto insurance buying public.
   
Gone are the days of an assigned-risk pool that controlled ten percent or more of the marketplace and all the programs and mechanisms employed by insurers and regulators alike to manage and control that population; gone are the ubiquitous advertisements guaranteeing access to coverage; gone is the market domination by no more than a handful of carriers; and gone is the market influenced and impacted so disproportionately by the omnipresence of fraud.
   
Without these factors, which for so long composed the very fabric of the New York auto insurance market, what does the auto insurance outlook portend?  
 
With the growth and sustenance of an expanded non-standard market that essentially replaced the assigned-risk plan, which moved more than a million insureds into the voluntary market, the new New York auto insurance market is a light-years departure from the methods and mechanics of the old market. The unleashing of market forces that followed the New York Court of Appeals ruling in the now-famous Regulation 68 litigation and the line of cases that have followed from it, forces now freed from the grip of organized fraud rings and some unscrupulous trial lawyers (mirrored only by recalcitrant insurance adjusters and defense attorneys who were more interested in settling cases than investigating and rooting out fraud) who preyed on the system, has provided the structural foundation for a sustained period of availability and affordability of auto insurance in all corners and for all types of drivers in the state.
   
Auto insurers, who saw losses drop precipitously from 85 cents or better on the dollar to less than 55 cents for every one hundred cents of claims, and then settle in the 60's and low 70's, have had to construct a whole new market approach to remain competitive and financially viable. No longer could they just cast off difficult risks: in this market, they need to manage risks within bands of premiums lest they be branded as uncompetitive. No longer can the assigned risk plan be a convenient detour for new and inexperienced drivers or motorists with high claims counts: regulatory changes prior to and in the aftermath of Regulation 68 forced insurers to more directly manage risk.   
 
And that is what they have done. Auto insurers, heeding the call that a new generation of auto insurance market was emerging and that "their father's insurance market" was moving into the hands of curators and not market managers, have set upon a new course of underwriting and, more importantly, claims management, to remain competitive and sustained in this new market.    

Chief among the changes has been an embracing of new technologies. One example is the acceptance of a new approach to the all-important independent medical examination, or IME. Once a key weapon in fighting fraud, IME's are now being utilized to promote efficiency and accuracy in claims administration.   
Auto insurance carriers are exploring, and now employing, new ways to manage the IME process. Gone—or certainly leaving—are the days when IME's were delivered by medical professionals and firms that had no greater qualifications than personal relationships with claims managers or executives of insurers. No longer can carriers rely upon connections as the primary, if not sole, criteria for selecting IME vendors; the IME process has become the new focus for delivering efficiency in the insurance claims process.  
 
Gone too are the days where the IME is a one-sided affair, seemingly inuring only to the benefit of the carrier. To be sure, the strength of personal relationships and the lust for retaining lucrative vendor contracts formed the basis for criticism— some fair and some unfair—to be levied against the vendors, and the insurers that employ them, that outcomes were directly related to the retention of contracts and not to the medical realities of a claim.  
 
Those days, as they say, are long over.
   
"The new marketplace, and the technology that can support it, does not need to rely upon such vestiges of ‘your father's auto insurance market,'" according to Joe Ring, chief executive officer of National Risk Assessment, a Florida-based independent medical examination company. "The IME process has come a long way, due in large part to the effective leveraging of technology, to the point where the carriers can now be confident that the information they are receiving from these examinations will be timely and, most critically, defensible," Ring says.    

National Risk Assessment and others like it have greatly accelerated the process of delivering independent medical examinations to insurers. Using the latest technologies, this generation of IME vendors eschews the old notions of moving slowly because the philosophies of their clients, the insurers, have evolved from one which advocated for delays in the claims process, to one which promotes speed and efficiency, especially when they can rely upon more certainly the outcomes of those examinations regardless of conclusion.
   
And like the sportier models that inevitably come from auto manufacturers who are trying to attract a younger consumer, auto insurers know that speed is now the name of the game. It has become as much an issue of competition as it is of regulatory compliance to provide a claims process that is speedy and reliable. There is simply too much competition in the current New York auto market, and certainly among the producers who oftentimes are critical catalysts in the claims process, to go along with the tighter claims management standards within the state's regulatory framework, to be satisfied with a slow and cumbersome IME program.
   
For the insurers, a modernization of the independent medical examination process comes at a critical time. Long criticized— and sued—for allegations of conspiracy in "fixing" medical exams for the purpose of minimizing claims payouts, the insurance industry can ill afford, and need not be captive to, those old notions of collusion with examiners, whether deserved or not. Further, the sheer reality of heightened and sustained competition within the auto insurance market in New York now makes the tolerance for such practices, or the allegations of such practices, necessarily on the wane.  
 
Insurers are now turning to a more professionalized and technologicallysavvy breed of independent medical examination providers. Through the use of new softwares and other electronic programs developed for tracking claims, facilitating and conducting exams, and analyzing claims, insurers are now both adding to their bottom line through greater efficiencies and attaining higher levels of confidence in IME results, which in turn better protect insurers from lawsuit- driven insinuations and regulatory inquiries. The power of new modalities puts the old practices of personal favoritism in IME provider selection, delays in scheduling and conducting IMEs, and the sometimes bald-faced incredibility of some outcomes on the scrap heap of unfortunate history.    

The state-of-the-art technologies now being offered to insurers will help reinvigorate the "independence" in independent me  dical examination regardless of the fact that it is the insurer, rightfully as the payer, is selecting the IME vendor.
   
IME professionals who are embracing new technology as the cornerstone of their practice are also providing some additional added value to the insurers and the policyholders they serve. Through the use of electronic media, IME vendors are adding critical support to the efforts ongoing to establish more reliable data bases regarding claims experience. These databases, populated with far more credible information from exams that employ the latest technologies to support the exam process, are allowing more meaningful data mining exercises to be undertaken and more valuable analytical conclusions to be reached. Technology is driving the IME process out of the subjective and to the objective which, for the forward-thinking insurer, is far more powerful and protective a force than the subjective evaluation buttressed by, well, nothing particularly objective.
   
As one researcher put it: "predictive modeling [in claims] appears to represent a significant new avenue for the insurance industry."1 The new-age IME vendor who embraces the objectivity and speed of technology will be a critical party in maximizing the new avenue to its fullest potential, be it within the four walls of a single carrier, or on an industry-wide basis.  
 
The critical challenge for insurers will be in breaking its practices from those of the past, where the comfort and collegiality of retaining those who are known and familiar to the claims personnel who are responsible for managing IME vendor relations. To be sure, there is great comfort and nostalgia in "your father's Oldsmobile", two qualities that can never be replicated. But the purpose of the automobile, like automobile insurance, is not so much to simply prolong old notions of comfort but to explore newer interpretations of comfort in contexts offering reliability in an efficient modality as well.  
 
National Risk Assessment, like many others now coming on line, employs proprietary programs that drive efficiency in the IME process without compromising quality of data coming out of these exams. More exams, in shorter periods of time, with higher-quality reports and more accurate analysis of actual physical conditions allow insurers to speed the claims process along and better protect it against frivolous litigation. Some insurers, through newer analytics producing outcomes that are more defensible, are even taking advantage of these new technologies to turn the tables on those who would seek to commit fraud against or abuse the claims process of carriers.  
 
One insurer, a major writer of fleet insurance in New York City, has taken its new proprietary claims analysis program, combined with new, more sophisticated IME vendors, to pursue aggressively injunctive relief and other legal remedies in bodily injury claim litigation before the cost of defense, much less indemnity, becomes detrimental to the insurer or the insured. The carrier has seen remarkable success by moving more proactively, armed with solid and sustainable information from its IME providers and its own internal investigations, on cases that it considers to be without merit.   
 
The moral to the Oldsmobile story, of course, is that the company, like its brethren in the General Motors family, only realized that it was stuck with "your father's Oldsmobile" too late to be effective in turning the tide of lower sales and less confidence among consumers. Oldsmobile went out of business when it was determined that its processes were too long gone to be sustainable, even with a stable of new cars. Others in GM are now looking at similar fates …and fiats (?).   
 
Insurers are not immune to the problems that befell Olds, and most likely Pontiac and others. Without recognizing the need to modernize its IME process, from the ground up and including employing an entirely new strategy in the selection of IME vendors, focusing on the technological expertise of the vendor who can deliver reliable IME results in the shortest time possible, an insurer is likely to go the way of the Oldsmobile, the Edsel and all the other monuments to the business axiom of change or wither. The independent medical examination process is that one place where efficiency and effectiveness actually go hand-in-hand, and represents the single most important place for insurers to plant the flag of innovation in order to remain competitive in a market that is certainly "not your father's auto insurance market."