How CBS Brokerage Increased Capacity by 50% with Pathwork
CBS now shops cases to 20 or more carriers at once, puts declined cases back in play, and turns first-year case managers into subject-matter experts.
Mattie Coacher
At a Glance
Customer | CBS Brokerage |
Industry | Life Insurance Distribution |
Customer Since | January 2026 |
Primary Use Cases | Medical record analysis, case shopping and negotiation, |
Impact
About CBS Brokerage
CBS Brokerage is a Minnesota-based life insurance brokerage general agency, founded in 2007 with a focus on client advocacy. Its specialty is insurance placement for RIAs and other fiduciary advisors.
Joslyn Druvenga, CBS’s President, describes the firm as deeply technical and deeply human. Her focus in the role has been modernizing how CBS works to remove friction for the team and improve outcomes for producers and clients.
The Challenge: A Three-Hour Bottleneck on Every Complex Case
Joslyn names three underwriting bottlenecks CBS had lived with for years: documentation, communication, and time-to-decision.
The biggest was documentation. Any case that didn't come back approved as applied meant a file of 140 pages or more, read by hand: every appointment, every medication, every follow-up cross-checked against the visit before it. A single file could take a case manager two to three hours to review.
And this isn't a junior-staff problem. Tedd Hikes, Senior Insurance Specialist at CBS, has spent years of his career reading APS files:
"I read a lot of APSs just to dig through and try to identify what the issues are, what I need to talk to my underwriter about, and how I can present a case in the best possible light to try to get an offer. That can take a half an hour—if it's a relatively small APS and you know what you're doing—to a couple hours. And that's for a seasoned underwriter."
Then there's Paige Forrester, who joined CBS as a case manager in May 2025, fresh out of college and brand new to insurance:
"Before this, I didn't even know how to read my own medical records. So reading 140-plus pages of someone else's was really intimidating. It would take me two to three hours to get through one set."
Reading files was only part of the delay. An underwriter's question would often require going back through the advisor to the client, while the case waited. And shopping for a better offer was limited to 12 or 13 carriers, the most CBS's previous platform could reach.
Why CBS Chose Pathwork
With Pathwork, CBS can review a 140-page file in minutes, get instant underwriting answers through chat, and shop a case to nearly twice as many carriers at once.
Here's what that looks like in practice: one case, from start to finish.
Inside the Workflow: From 3 Hours to 30 Minutes
When a carrier comes back with an approved other than applied, a decline, or a postpone, Pathwork is Paige's first stop:
Upload. She creates a case and uploads what CBS has access to, like medical records, exams, and application forms. Within two to three minutes, Pathwork returns a structured summary.
Review. The document analysis timeline breaks the record into the conditions that matter, the output she used to assemble by hand.
Verify. She digs deeper with Pathwork’s Chat with Files feature, pulls favorable factors and the care-team breakdown, and checks key details against the records themselves. A few bullets from that analysis go to the advisor's internal marketer so everyone's aligned before the case goes back out.
Send. Pathwork drafts a carrier-ready cover letter. Paige reviews and refines it, then shops the case to 20 or more carriers, automatically.
Declined and Stalled Cases Back in Play
Time isn't the only thing saved. Paige now saves cases she wouldn't have pursued a year ago.
A client with high cholesterol and a high coronary calcium score came back declined. Paige ran the file through Pathwork, which surfaced factors the carrier hadn't considered: the client worked out five days a week, drank little, and kept up with screenings and follow-ups. She sent the findings to the underwriter, who escalated the case to a medical consultation. The decline came back approved at standard.
"I was just so excited to go back to the advisor and tell them about the approval. It was right in front of me in Pathwork, so I just threw it into my note to the underwriter, any chance of reconsideration, and it ended up being successful."
-Paige Forrester, Case Manager, CBS Brokerage
A second case was tracking toward best class when the underwriter flagged a missing ultrasound. Usually that means chasing the imaging while the offer sits. Instead, Paige searched the file in Pathwork: the ultrasound really was missing, but every follow-up after it was clean, with no symptoms or treatment tied to the condition. She took that back to the underwriter, who approved best class without waiting on the imaging.
With Pathwork, Paige doesn't write declines off anymore. "I don't lose hope," she said.
The Results: 50% More Capacity, 20-Plus Carriers, Faster Offers
Case capacity: 50% more, without burnout. Paige handles 120 cases today; she estimates she'd be at about 80 without Pathwork.
Carrier reach: from 12-13 carriers to 20+ per case.
Time per case: from 3 hours of reading to 30 minutes start to finish.
Faster time to offer: Straightforward cases that once meant days of shuffling files now come back near-instantly; even complex ones come back within days.
The Unexpected Benefit: It Changed Who CBS Could Hire
The learning curve had always been steep because the knowledge lived in people: new case managers learned by asking a trainer or a senior colleague, and through years of practice. But Pathwork put that knowledge instantly in reach, and prior industry experience stopped being a requirement.
Paige is the proof. By her first anniversary, she was running more than 75% of her cases through Pathwork, and at CBS's Friday case management meetings, she was teaching more tenured colleagues about features they hadn't discovered yet.
A Real Partnership
Ask Joslyn what stands out about working with Pathwork, and she emphasizes the people: the ongoing check-ins, the willingness to adapt, the constant improvements to the platform.
"The Pathwork team is open to feedback and genuinely invested in how the tool fits into our workflows, not just how it's supposed to work in theory, which is so different from other tools in our industry. It's been a game changer."
-Joslyn Druvenga, President, CBS Brokerage
See Pathwork in Action
Book a live demo to see how Pathwork takes your team from a stack of medical records to a fully shopped case in minutes.