A new study of insurance chief information and chief technology officers from Europe and the U.S. says that at least some insurers are considering the idea of outsourcing a portion of their claim-adjusting procedures.

The annual study, Insurance CIO/CTO Pressures, Priorities, Projects, and Plans 2008: The View Across the Atlantic, was written by Boston-based financial research and consulting firm Celent, who says the report is designed to expose behaviors, initiatives, challenges, and priorities for the insurance industry while at the same time comparing and contrasting results in Europe against the U.S. Specifically, Celent's European and U.S. CIO/CTO surveys provide insight into general priorities and business pressures, budgets and staffing, specific IT initiatives, platforms and technology choices, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services, outsourcing, and web 2.0 technologies.

Survey respondents all came from the technology sector, and they were asked several questions from an IT perspective. When the group was asked to consider the probability of outsourcing some claim-related operational functions and processes on a scale of one to 10 (one meaning "never," 10 meaning "already doing so"), U.S. mid-size insurers ranked it as 4.44 while U.S. large insurers came in at 4.11.