Development of Total Loss Claim Determination Information System for Reinforced Concrete Buildings for Residential Earthquake Basic Insurance in TAIWAN

摘要

In order to secure the policyholders against losses due to earthquakes that are common natural calamities in Taiwan, the government launched a residential earthquake insurance system several years ago. Policyholders can be indemnified by total loss claim for quake-related losses of property. Despite there are many other professionals involved in the assessment procedure for total loss claim, the qualified adjusters from underwriters are pivotal to the assessment of total loss claims. The qualified adjusters are personnel of non-life insurance companies that underwent training courses for earthquake building damage assessment and many of them are not professionals in civil engineering. Their determination of total loss claims are based on claim standard operation procedure (SOP) established by Taiwan Residential Earthquake Insurance Fund (TREIF) and mainly relies on personal experience and knowledge of earthquake building damages. Furthermore, considering that reinforced concrete buildings account for more than 76% effective policies in Taiwan, a quantified loss model for total loss claim determination for RC buildings has been developed in 2009. In this paper, we developed an information system based on the quantified loss model and claims SOP that includes a total loss claim determination system (TLCDS) for qualified adjusters of insurance companies and a centralized database management system (TLDBMS) for TREIF. Claims handling procedure, related forms and the quantified model for determining total Toss claims are discussed in the paper. It is believed the proposed information system will be helpful to enhance the efficiency and quality of damage assessment and total loss claim handling operation.