The photos policyholders upload for vehicle damage estimates now let claims systems estimate how sharply a car stopped and which occupants were likely hurt. That lets carriers contact an injured person before symptoms worsen - or before an attorney builds a case - says Bryan Falchuk, CEO of the Property & Liability Resource Bureau (PLRB) in Downers Grove, Illinois.
Falchuk described the output such a system can produce: “Given the damage to this car, the likelihood of the speed, the range of speed and the velocity with which that speed ended was X. And so that means the chance of whiplash, of injuries from a seatbelt.”
CCC Intelligent Solutions’ Impact Dynamics product applies AI to photos of vehicle damage to predict impact severity, which insurers can use to spot injury potential early and to inform casualty claim routing, early settlement and reserving, CCC said in an October 2023 release. Falchuk laid out the use case in a 2022 white paper written for Insurance Evolution Partners with financial support from CCC - a relationship worth noting given that CCC’s technology is central to the application he describes. In the paper, CCC said it worked with 18 of the top 20 carriers’ auto physical damage teams. Those carriers already collect the photos the model needs.
The white paper’s data predates the product’s wider availability, and neither Falchuk nor CCC has published accuracy rates for photo-based injury prediction. Falchuk’s own advice for any claims technology applies here: demand results tested on real claims, with a stated accuracy rate, before deploying.
The calculation rests on the change in velocity at impact, which the industry calls Delta-V. Falchuk’s paper contrasts two crashes. A car that drops from 20 miles per hour to zero in a fraction of a second suffers more damage, and its passengers face a higher likelihood of severe injury, than a car that slows from five miles per hour to zero over a full second.
The system then maps that force estimate onto the seating chart. “Where on the door was this injury? Well, there was a passenger sitting there. So should we expect an injury to an arm, a leg, the spine, whatever? Haven’t seen that reported,” Falchuk said. When the system expects an injury and no one reports one, the carrier gains information it previously lacked. The photo must be clear and complete for this to work; partial or obscured damage images reduce the reliability of the Delta-V estimate.
Falchuk sees two explanations for that silence, and both justify contact. The injured person may not yet have sought care. “The shock, you don’t feel it, and then you wake up the next morning and you can’t move,” he said. “And what if someone is in internal bleeding and they just don’t know yet?” Or the injured person may already have legal representation. “An attorney could be involved already. And so it’s not getting to the carrier because they’re amassing a case. The sooner we figure that out and try to get on the right side of it, the better,” Falchuk said.
The financial stakes behind that second scenario appear in his paper. Citing Sedgwick, it reported that claims with early attorney representation rose 25.5% over the five years ending in 2021. Citing a Milliman study of Texas commercial auto claims, it reported that represented claims cost 15.3 times as much as unrepresented ones. Both figures are from research Falchuk cites secondhand in his 2022 paper, and current rates may differ - but the directional case for early contact has not weakened as attorney involvement has continued to rise.
Meg Sutton, then senior vice president of casualty claims at Liberty Mutual, said in the paper: “The more quickly you can reach out, price the claim and make a reasonable offer, the more likely the matter is to be resolved before an attorney is involved, which would raise the risk of a nuclear verdict.”
Carriers have long avoided unprompted outreach for fear of generating claims their adjusters cannot absorb, the paper noted. Falchuk frames the call as service rather than solicitation: “We’re here to help you and we’re here to be caring. And that’s a way we can deliver that.”
The technology’s value depends on a data problem most carriers have not solved. Most keep physical damage and casualty claims in separate teams with separate systems, and Falchuk experienced the cost of that separation directly. After another driver rear-ended his family’s car, the at-fault carrier repaired the vehicle within two weeks. The injury claim took more than eight months and passed through three adversarial adjusters. Medical bills for two people came to under $1,200, while the physical damage claim ran more than ten times that. On the final call, Falchuk learned that the casualty adjusters had no access to the repair data.
With Delta-V figures in hand, he wrote, an adjuster could have confirmed the injuries fit the crash and paid the bills without dispute - eight months of friction for a claim smaller than the cost of a single adjuster hour of dispute.
Carriers can keep the claims teams separate while sharing the underlying insight, the paper argues. The separation exists to manage conflicts between the two claim types, not to prevent data from crossing the aisle.
For claims executives, the investment question differs from a typical technology purchase: most carriers already own the photos. The decision is whether casualty teams are permitted to use them. “The adjuster deserves a set of tools and facts to help them deliver an excellent claim result in a timely fashion,” said Brian Passell, a former president of claims at Progressive, in Falchuk’s paper. “The APD people have that, and the Casualty people really haven’t, but can now.”
