Solving the Challenges of Automation in Personal Injury

15 December 2025 / 4 min read

The insurance industry has made impressive progress in automating many of the high-volume, simple tasks that inundate workflows. About 20% of all tasks have some level of automation today—a world away from the manual underwriting, risk assessments, and claims journeys of yesteryear—with predictions that up to 80% is within reach.

Perhaps nowhere does automation promise to save time and improve journeys as much as for personal injury in the motor space. These claims once plagued the industry, with high numbers of contentious medical reports generating outsized losses.

Today, insurers can genuinely see a world where software automatically “reads” these reports, streamlining the claims process for typical and low-value claims and allowing insurers to dedicate more resources to areas that need them. But reaching that world requires adapting to several evasive factors that have already begun to shift.

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The whiplash journey

The sweeping whiplash reforms of 2021 named, by way of a tariff, the amount of damages a court may award for a road traffic accident. The broad goal was to improve the claims process for all parties—streamlining it for claimants, reducing the cost of claims for insurers, and reducing premiums for policyholders—including by enabling automatic settlement of simple claims without any handler intervention.

The tariff simply considers the injury and recovery time presented in a claimant’s medical report and translates them into a level of compensation. Automating the process relies on the assumption that there will be no changes in the format of medical reports, injuries and their severity, and types of losses.

If any of those factors shift—as is already happening for some of them—the automation process will need to shift, too.

What automation tells us about personal injury claims

More than 40,000 medical reports have been automatically assessed this year so far. Those automatic assessments rely on critical guardrails—effectively, the rules that define which reports are sufficiently serious and complex to need attention from a claims handler.

How do we know where to place those guardrails? Luckily, a database of more than 2 million personal injury claims illustrates which injuries can be expected in various kinds of road incidents, helping to validate the contents of medical reports.

Verisk analysis has found an interesting discrepancy between the injuries reported at notification and those documented in medical reports. Nearly half (49%) of non-tariff injuries reported at notification aren’t subsequently included in the medical report. Meanwhile, 33% of non-tariff injuries that are noted in medical reports weren’t previously included at notification.

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These discrepancies challenge the industry when it comes to automation. It must be determined which of these incidents involved a genuine mistake, misunderstanding, or legitimate reason for a delay reporting symptoms. Ultimately, they beg the question: When does a medical report warrant further investigation?

Changes in injuries and accidents

As mentioned above, automation works effectively when the assumptions guiding the process remain unchanged. However, in the years since whiplash was defined and regulations were strengthened, we’ve seen changes in both the kinds of road incidents involving claimants and the injuries they sustained.

For instance, while hit and rear collisions remain by far the most common kind of incident, the proportion of injuries sustained in these collisions has fallen by 10% as car safety improves. Collisions involving lane-changing, by contrast, are on the rise—a curious phenomenon given lower speed limits across most of the UK and more driver assistance technology.

These changes will pose challenges in the coming years to predict the likelihood of injury-incident combinations. Once again, it will become important to interrogate which medical reports can be automated and which are so complex that a skilled claims handler should examine them.

These issues are far from insurmountable, and Verisk’s experts work consistently to understand the changing nature of personal injury claims and how to adapt our approaches.

Insurers looking to embrace automation must also consider how best to focusing their energies. For instance, tariff injuries have little impact on the level of compensation, and so discrepancies here may be considered of limited importance. Non-tariff injuries, however, can significantly affect claims costs and so may require closer attention.

As the industry moves towards a world where the majority of claims involve some level of automation, it’s important to determine which claims are best suited to this approach. As the makeup of claims evolves, so must the guardrails and the technology that enable automation.

Learn more: Claims Outcome Advisor