GP notes and medical records

New Zealand insurers cannot look you up. There is no shared medical database they can query and no automatic feed from the health system. What they have is a consent form you signed, which authorises them to write to your doctor and ask. That is a narrower power than most people assume, and it is also broader in one respect: what comes back is written by your practice, not by you.

Most requests take the form of a personal medical attending report, often abbreviated to PMAR. The insurer sends your GP a structured questionnaire about the conditions you disclosed, and sometimes about your history generally. The GP completes it, usually charging the insurer a fee, and returns it. In some cases — a significant history, a large sum insured, or a discrepancy the underwriter wants to resolve — the insurer will ask for the full clinical notes instead.

Full notes are exactly that. Every consultation entry, every referral, every result, every prescription, and every free-text remark a clinician typed at the time. A comment about drinking made in passing eleven years ago is in there. So is the referral for a scan you had forgotten about because nothing was found.

What is typically in a report

• Dates and reasons for consultations, including ones you would consider routine.
• Referrals to specialists and the outcome, where the practice has it.
• Results of tests ordered by the practice.
• A prescribing history, which is often the most revealing part of the file.
• Recorded measurements — weight, blood pressure, smoking status, alcohol intake as recorded at the time.
• Free-text clinical notes, which may contain observations you never discussed as a diagnosis.

Read your own notes first

Under the Privacy Act you can ask your practice for a copy of your own health information, and they must respond within twenty working days. There may be a reasonable charge. Doing this before you apply is one of the highest-value steps available to anyone with a complicated history, for three reasons.

1. 1It reminds you of things you would otherwise omit in good faith — a referral, a short course of medication, an investigation that came to nothing.
2. 2It lets you correct genuine errors. Records do contain mistakes, and a wrongly recorded diagnosis is far easier to fix before an underwriter has read it.
3. 3It lets you provide context up front. If the notes contain a remark that reads badly out of context, a covering letter or a specialist report supplied at the same time prevents the underwriter forming a view from the raw entry alone.

These are the details that decide whether the cover does what you expected. Read them before you compare on price.

• The scope of the consent you sign — which practitioners, which period, and whether it continues after the policy is issued.
• That full notes can be requested, not just a summary, and that they contain free text.
• That practices charge for reports and can take weeks, and that a polite call from you often speeds it up more than the insurer chasing.
• Your right to request your own records first, and to ask for corrections to factual errors.
• Your right to ask to see a report obtained about you, and to ask the underwriter what in it drove the decision.
• That a previous insurer’s records are separate — a new insurer sees only what you disclose and what your doctor sends.

Every New Zealand insurer writes medical evidence to its own wording, and the words are where the money is. Two policies that look identical on price can pay very differently when it matters. Closing that gap is the entire job of an adviser.

• An adviser can tell you when a GP report is likely to be requested, so you can review your own notes beforehand rather than being surprised.
• Where a note reads badly out of context, an adviser can supply a specialist letter or explanation alongside it.
• Advisers chase records, which is unglamorous and is the single biggest cause of delay in New Zealand underwriting.
• If an underwriter has misread a record, an adviser can ask for the decision to be reconsidered with the correct interpretation.
• An adviser knows which insurers order full notes more readily than others, which matters if your file is long.

There are three ways to buy life cover in New Zealand, and they are not equivalent. You can buy direct from one insurer, which means you see one product range and one underwriting appetite. You can buy through your bank, which usually means a single insurer’s product sold under the bank’s brand, often with narrower definitions. Or you can go through an adviser, who quotes several insurers at once and is required to put your interests first.

The premium you pay is the same either way. Insurers build adviser commission into their pricing whether or not an adviser is involved, so going direct does not get you a discount — it just removes the person whose job is to argue your corner at application and at claim time.

• An adviser can see which insurer is currently taking your health history on standard terms, and which one will load or exclude it.
• An adviser can structure cover across two insurers if that produces a better outcome than putting everything with one.
• An adviser handles the underwriting back-and-forth, and is the person who chases the claim when a family is least able to.
• An adviser has to document why the recommendation suits you, which is a written record you can hold them to.

We are a referral service, not an insurer. We do not quote premiums and we do not sell policies. What we do is put you in front of one licensed New Zealand adviser who can compare the market properly.

1. 1

   You tell us what you are looking at

   The form takes about a minute. Nobody asks for your medical history on a web form — that conversation happens with the adviser, properly, and only once you have decided to proceed.

2. 2

   An adviser calls you

   A licensed New Zealand adviser talks through your situation: who depends on you, what you owe, what you already have in place, and what you are actually worried about.

3. 3

   They compare the market

   The adviser quotes across the major insurers, checks which of them will take your health history on the best terms, and puts the options side by side in writing.

4. 4

   You decide, in your own time

   There is no obligation and no cost to you. If the answer is that you already have enough cover, a good adviser will tell you that.