Veriscopic Launches Initiative to Measure 'Reconstruction Burden' in Insurance Decision-Making

Veriscopic, a company developing replayable decision-state infrastructure for insurance, has launched an industry initiative to measure an often overlooked operational cost: the burden of reconstructing consequential insurance decisions after they have been made.

Across underwriting, claims, delegated authority and increasingly AI-assisted workflows, organisations routinely need to revisit historical decisions. A claim may be challenged. An underwriting decision may require review. A delegated authority file may be audited. A complaint, regulatory enquiry, litigation or reinsurance discussion may require an organisation to demonstrate not simply what happened, but why a particular decision was reasonable given the information available at the time.

The outcome is often recorded. Reconstructing the decision-state behind it can be considerably harder. Evidence may be distributed across policy administration systems, claims platforms, emails, documents, spreadsheets, model outputs, approval workflows and individual recollection.

Veriscopic describes the resulting effort as reconstruction burden: the collective time and operational cost required to rebuild the context surrounding a historical decision. The company is now seeking to measure that burden across real insurance workflows.

The initiative will examine factors including: how frequently historical decisions need to be reconstructed; how many people become involved; the collective hours required; how many systems and evidence sources must be consulted; the elapsed time required to establish the decision context; and how much of that effort could potentially have been avoided if the relevant decision-state had been preserved when the decision occurred.

“Insurance is very good at recording outcomes, but an outcome and the evidence behind a decision are not the same thing,” said Drew Young, Founder of Veriscopic. “When a decision is questioned months or years later, organisations can find themselves rebuilding the surrounding context from multiple systems and fragments of evidence. We want to understand what that reconstruction actually costs.”

Veriscopic is developing infrastructure designed around the concept of decision-state. Rather than relying solely on historical logs or attempting to recreate context retrospectively, decision-state preservation captures the material conditions surrounding a consequential decision when it occurs.

“As insurance adopts more AI, the question will not simply be whether an organisation can produce an audit trail. It will increasingly be whether it can demonstrate the state in which a consequential decision was actually made. Replayability turns that from a retrospective investigation into an infrastructure problem,” Drew added.