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Quick answer
Since the early 1990s much of the US auto insurance industry has valued bodily injury claims with software. The best-known program assigns codes to injuries from a set of roughly 600 profiles, attaches severity points, converts points to dollars, and returns a recommended settlement range.
The dollar value of a severity point is not fixed by nature. It is a setting, configured region by region in a process the industry calls tuning. In depositions unsealed in Arkansas litigation, the software vendor's own executives described tuning as adjustable toward a savings target.
The practical consequence for you: the system cannot price what is not written in your medical records. Symptoms you never mentioned at an appointment, future treatment nobody documented, and gaps in care with no stated reason are all invisible to the calculation.
The thesis of this series in one line: the process that prices your injury was designed by consultants, tuned on past settlements, and built around whether you have anyone advising you.
In Part 1 we told you the fast phone call was a designed step, not a coincidence.
That leaves the question that actually decides how much money you end up with. Where did the number come from?
Somebody had to decide what a herniated disc is worth. What six weeks of physical therapy is worth. What a shoulder that will never quite work right again is worth.
It was not the person on the phone.
The short version
Since the early 1990s, much of the American auto insurance industry has valued bodily injury claims with software. The best-known program assigns codes to injuries, attaches severity points to those codes, converts points into dollars, and hands the adjuster a recommended settlement range.
Here is the part that matters: the dollar value of a severity point is not fixed by nature. It is a setting. Insurers configure it, region by region, in a process the industry calls tuning. And under oath, the vendor's own executives described tuning as something that could be set to hit a target.
Your injury got a code. The code got points. The points got multiplied by a number somebody chose.
WHAT THEY DID
Where the software came from
The program began in Australia. In 1988 a government insurance office that was losing money commissioned a system to reduce claim payments. It worked, and other insurers began licensing it. An American insurer was the first to test it here in the early 1990s. The company that owned it merged into Computer Sciences Corporation in 1996; CSC in turn merged with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's services business in April 2017 to form DXC Technology, per filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Note what the origin story is. This was not built to measure injuries accurately. It was commissioned to bring payouts down. That was the product requirement from day one — and it was never hidden. It was the sales pitch.
How a person becomes a number
The adjuster collects your medical records and works through a series of screens, selecting injury codes from a set of about 600. They enter your treatments and visits by specialty, medications, diagnostic tests, hospital stays, physical therapy, restriction of movement, pain, bills, lost wages, permanent impairment, disfigurement, aggravation of anything pre-existing, how long you treated — and whether there were gaps in your treatment.
Then they select a final prognosis code. Roughly: resolved, no complaint versus still complaining, further treatment expected.
The software returns a recommended settlement range — a high number and a low number, typically about twenty percent apart.
Every one of those entries is a judgment call, made by someone who is not your doctor.
Tuning: the setting nobody tells you about
This is the part that took a lawsuit to make public.
Before the software goes live, the vendor runs a benchmark session — experienced adjusters value hypothetical claims to set a starting point. Then comes a closed file study: the insurer runs already-settled claims back through the software and compares what it would have recommended against what the company actually paid.
If the recommendations do not produce the savings the company wants, the settings get adjusted.
In depositions taken in 2008 in a class action in Miller County, Arkansas, the vendor's director of Colossus services was asked how an insurer could achieve a particular level of savings — fifteen percent was the example. His answer, in substance: the tuning can be set to potentially achieve that. A vice president of the same company agreed it could be tuned up and down. A 1996 tuning manual, produced in that litigation, described the tuning decision as flowing from the desired projected savings.
And in the vendor's own marketing deck, under a heading asking what the product really does, the first item on the list was "Lowers indemnity payouts" — followed by lower loss ratios and improved profitability. The average figure the vendor cited to prospects was around nineteen to twenty percent.
Read that once more. Not "values claims accurately." Not "reduces inconsistency between adjusters." The first listed answer to what does this really do was that it lowers what gets paid out.
Why the same injury is worth different amounts in different places
The software is configured by economic region, and each insurer decides how to draw those regions — by state, county, ZIP code, or claims office. So an identical injury with identical records can produce a different recommended range depending on which side of a line you were standing on. That is not a bug. That is the design.
The part we are not going to do
Lists circulate online naming insurance companies said to use this software. Many appear on law firm marketing pages — exactly the kind of source we told you in Part 1 we would not rely on.
We are not publishing a list, and here is the honest reason. We cannot verify from primary sources which insurers use which valuation software on which claims in 2026. Vendors treat it as a trade secret; insurers do not publish it; the most detailed public accounting we found is over a decade old.
A list we cannot stand behind would be worse than no list. It would also be the easiest thing on this page to attack — and knocking it down would take everything else with it.
What we can do instead is more useful anyway: teach you how to ask. That is Part 4.
What the record does not tell us
Two honest limits. We do not know how any specific company tunes its software today — the detailed evidence spans the 1990s through roughly 2012. And valuation software is not illegal. A tool that helps adjusters value similar injuries similarly is a defensible thing to build. The concern regulators and consumer advocates raised was narrower: whether the output was working as a reference point, or as a ceiling.
Both can be true at once. A tool can be legitimate and still be tuned toward an outcome.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU
You are not negotiating with a person's opinion
When an adjuster says the offer reflects what your claim is worth, that sentence is doing a lot of hidden work. What it often means in practice is: this is what the range came back as. And that range came from codes somebody selected, entered into a system somebody configured, at a dollar-per-point value somebody set.
That changes what negotiating even means. Arguing about fairness with a person who cannot move the underlying settings is not a negotiation. The leverage is in the inputs, not in the conversation.
Were you in a crash? Start a free accident record at nowaccident.com. No signup, no email, nothing sold. This next section is the reason the record matters: what is not documented does not exist to the calculation. A written account of your symptoms, day by day, is something only you can create — and only while it is happening.
What is missing from your file is missing from the number
This is the single most practical thing in this entire series, so we are going to say it as directly as we can.
The system cannot price what is not written down.
Not what you told your friend. Not what you feel on bad mornings. Not the fact that you cannot lift your kid anymore. If it is not in the medical record, in a form that maps onto a code, it does not exist as far as the calculation is concerned.
Specific things the record shows the software cares about — every one of which lives in your medical file:
| What the system reads | What that means for you |
|---|---|
| Injury coding | A finding written one way and a finding written another way can land on different codes |
| Final prognosis | Whether your records say resolved or ongoing, further treatment expected moves the value |
| Future treatment | If nobody wrote down that you will need more care, the calculation assumes you will not |
| Permanent impairment rating | Absent from the file means absent from the math |
| Length of treatment | A short course of treatment reads as a minor injury |
| Gaps in treatment | A month you skipped because you could not afford the copay reads as a month you were fine |
That last one deserves a moment. Missing appointments because of money, work, or childcare is not read as hardship. It is read as recovery. People are penalized for being broke and busy, and almost nobody warns them.
About "your MRI shows nothing serious"
Insider accounts in the public record describe a real risk: a claims employee without medical training reads an imaging report and codes a finding as less severe than the treating physician described.
We are not saying that is happening on your claim. We are saying that if your doctor's assessment and the insurer's version of your injury do not match, that gap is worth noticing rather than assuming you misunderstood.
The report you were never handed
The software generates a report when the adjuster finishes the entry — the record of what was entered and what came out.
In 2012 the Consumer Federation of America recommended that regulators require insurers to give claimants a copy of that report, so people could actually check whether their injuries, bills, and lost wages had been entered correctly.
That recommendation was not adopted as a general requirement. The document that explains your number exists. You were not given it, and in most places nobody has to give it to you.
We will come back to that gap. It is the subject of Part 4.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
Read your own medical records. Then fix what is missing.
One thing. This one.
Request your records from every provider you have seen since the crash — the ER, your doctor, the specialist, the physical therapist. Most offices now have a patient portal that will hand them over in a day.
Then read them with a pen, looking for exactly four things:
1. Symptoms you have but that are not written anywhere. Headaches. Numbness or tingling. Sleep you are not getting. Anxiety about driving. Things that got worse after the first visit. If you never said it out loud in an appointment, it is not in there.
2. A prognosis that says you are finished when you are not. If the note reads as though everything has resolved and it has not, that is the single highest-leverage discrepancy in the entire file.
3. Future care that is expected but never documented. If your doctor mentioned you might need injections, more therapy, or a follow-up in six months — and the note does not say so — the system will assume it is not coming.
4. Gaps, and the reason for them. If you missed six weeks, the file should say why. "Patient unable to attend due to work schedule" and "patient did not return" describe the same six weeks and mean opposite things.
Then, at your next appointment, say all of it out loud. Not as a strategy. As accurate reporting to your own doctor, which is what it is. Ask that your current symptoms and the plan going forward be reflected in the note.
Why this and why now:
- It is free or nearly free, and the records are yours by right.
- It is the only step that improves both your medical care and your claim at the same time — which is exactly why it is the one we are asking for.
- Records get harder to correct as they age. Today's appointment is easier to get right than last month's.
One caution, and we mean it: this is about making the record complete and accurate, not about making it dramatic. Report what is true. An exaggerated record is worse than an incomplete one — it damages your credibility, and it damages your care.
Find out where you are in the process
Already been offered a number? Our free tool walks you through what that stage usually looks like, what you are likely to hear, and how to check your insurer's record in California's official complaint study.
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Frequently asked questions
What software do insurance companies use to value injury claims? The best-known is Colossus, a rule-based claims evaluation program developed in the late 1980s and used in the US auto insurance industry since the early 1990s. It assigns severity points across roughly 600 injury profiles and converts them into a recommended general damages range. It was owned by Computer Sciences Corporation, which merged with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's services business in April 2017 to form DXC Technology.
How does claims valuation software decide what my injury is worth? An adjuster enters injury codes, treatments and visits by specialty, medications, diagnostic tests, hospital stays, physical therapy, restriction of movement, pain, bills, lost wages, permanent impairment, disfigurement, aggravation of pre-existing conditions, length of treatment, and gaps in treatment, then selects a final prognosis code. The program returns a recommended settlement range, typically with a high and a low about twenty percent apart.
What is tuning in insurance claims software? Tuning is the process of configuring what a severity point is worth in dollars. A vendor benchmark session sets a starting point; then a closed file study runs already-settled claims back through the software and compares its recommendations against what the company actually paid. If the results do not produce the savings the insurer wants, the settings are adjusted. Depositions unsealed in Arkansas litigation described tuning as adjustable toward a target savings percentage.
Why do gaps in medical treatment reduce a settlement offer? Gaps are a data entry field. A month you skipped because you could not afford the copay, could not get time off work, or had no childcare is recorded the same way as a month in which you had recovered — unless the reason is documented in the record. Asking your provider to note the reason for any gap is one of the few corrections available to a claimant.
Can I get a copy of the software report used to value my claim? Generally no. The Consumer Federation of America recommended in 2012 that regulators require insurers to give claimants a copy of the consultation report the software generates. That recommendation was not adopted as a general requirement.
Which insurance companies use Colossus? We do not publish a list. Lists circulate online, mostly on law firm marketing pages, but usage of specific valuation software by specific insurers on specific claims is treated as proprietary and cannot be verified against primary sources for 2026. A list we could not stand behind would be worse than none.
What should I do if my medical records do not match my symptoms? Request your records from every provider you have seen since the crash and read them, looking for symptoms you have that are not written anywhere, a prognosis recorded as resolved when it is not, future care that was discussed but never documented, and gaps with no stated reason. Then report what is accurate at your next appointment. The goal is a complete and truthful record — an exaggerated one damages both your credibility and your care.
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Next in this series
If all of this sounds like something regulators should have looked at — they did.
In 2010, insurance regulators finished the first multi-state examination ever aimed at an insurer's claims valuation software. They reviewed data on nearly two million claims.
They opened none of them.
Part 3 — They Examined Two Million Claims. They Opened None of Them.
Sources
- Consumer Federation of America, "Low Ball: An Insider's Look at How Some Insurers Can Manipulate Computerized Systems to Broadly Underpay Injury Claims" (Mark Romano and J. Robert Hunter, June 4, 2012). The primary source for the mechanics described above: injury codes and severity values, the tuning process, prognosis and data-entry effects, economic regions, and the recommendation that claimants receive the consultation report. Romano previously served as the home-office Colossus subject-matter expert at a major insurer, responsible for tuning, upgrades, and training. Hunter is a former Texas Insurance Commissioner and Federal Insurance Administrator. CFA is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization; disclosed as such.
- Georgia Hensley, et al. v. Computer Sciences Corporation, et al., Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas, No. 2006-59-3 — the litigation in which vendor documents and depositions were released from confidential designation. Executive depositions (April and May 2008) and the June 1996 tuning manual are cited in the CFA report above with document control numbers.
- DXC Technology Company, Form 10-Q and annual report, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — the April 1, 2017 merger of Computer Sciences Corporation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Enterprise Services business to form DXC.
- California Department of Insurance, Consumer Complaint Study, published under California Insurance Code § 12921.1 — insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/120-company/03-concmplt
Not used as sources: law firm marketing pages, settlement-estimate services, and circulating lists of insurers said to use particular valuation software. We could not verify those against primary records.
Reviewed by: Alex Song, Ph.D. — Researcher
Last updated: August 8, 2026
Read this first. What follows is drawn from court records unsealed in Arkansas litigation, from sworn depositions of the software vendor's own executives, and from a 2012 report written by the man who ran this software inside a major insurer's head office. Most of it describes the 1990s and 2000s. We are not telling you that any particular company is doing any particular thing to your claim today. We are telling you how the machine was built, because that is what lets you deal with it.
This is general information, not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. It is also not medical advice — decisions about your treatment belong to you and your doctor. Laws vary by state and change over time.
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