Watching a metric

What watching a metric does

Some numbers you check once. Others you want to know the moment they move, a benchmark you are working to close, an industry series that shapes your next quarter. Watching a metric puts that number on a standing watch: Verinode records where it stands the day you start watching, then tells you when it changes meaningfully, so you do not have to keep opening the Benchmarks page to check.

Watching is a nudge, not an alarm. It does not act on anything or change any number. It simply keeps an eye on the metric for you and surfaces a change when one that matters actually happens, the way a good chief of staff flags the one thing that moved rather than reading you the whole report every morning.

The two kinds of metric you can watch

You can watch metrics in two places, and Verinode treats them slightly differently:

• Your benchmarks, on the main Benchmarks page. These are your own numbers measured against your peer cohort, like margin, collection rate, or a cost ratio.
• Industry series, on the Industry Data tab of Benchmarks. These are published macro and industry indicators (combined ratios, claims frequency, regional housing starts, and the like), each scoped to a region. Watching the same indicator in two regions creates two separate watches, so you can follow, say, national and your own state independently.

Starting and stopping a watch

Watching lives on a small bell control that sits on the metric's row or tile.

1. 1On the Benchmarks page (or the Industry Data tab), find the metric you want to follow.
2. 2Click the bell on its row. It fills in copper to show the watch is on. Its tooltip reads "Watching. IQ will tell you when it moves."
3. 3To stop, click the same bell again. It returns to a muted outline, its tooltip reads "Watch. Get notified when it moves," and the watch is removed.

The bell is a toggle: on, then off, on the same control. Clicking it never opens the metric's deep-dive, so you can start or stop a watch from inside a busy row without losing your place. The change saves immediately and the bell updates the instant you click, even before the save settles.

What you get notified about

Verinode checks your watched metrics once a day and only tells you when a change is genuinely worth your attention. A change counts as meaningful when any of these is true:

• A new official reading lands. For a series that reports on a period (a month, a quarter, or a year), the period rolling forward with a fresh reading counts as news.
• The value moves by 5% or more. This covers volatile live series and benchmark numbers that have no clean reporting period.
• The first value appears where there was none when you started watching.

This threshold is deliberate. It keeps a daily-volatile series (storm reports, weather alerts) from emailing you every single day, while still catching the real moves. Once Verinode notifies you about a change, it resets its baseline to the new value, so you hear about each move once, not on repeat.

Where notifications and watched metrics surface

When a watched metric moves, the alert reaches you in two places at once:

• The notification bell in the app, as a notification titled with the metric and its new value, for example "Combined ratio is now 101%."
• Your IQ daily digest email, folded in with the day's other intelligence, so a change reaches you even on a day you do not open the app.

Each alert links you straight back to where the metric lives: a watched benchmark opens the Benchmarks page so you can see where you now stand against your cohort; a watched industry series opens the Industry Data tab, with a pointer to Forecasting for what the move means for you. From there you can open the metric's deep-dive to see the full distribution and history behind the new number.

Best-practice example

Say you are working to lift your supplement approval rate and you want to know the moment your cohort standing shifts. Open Benchmarks, find the metric, and click its bell; it fills copper and Verinode records today's value as the baseline. Weeks later your rate climbs past the 5% threshold as a batch of supplements settles. The next daily check catches it: a bell notification and a line in your digest read that your approval rate has moved, linking you back to Benchmarks. You open the deep-dive, confirm your dot has crossed the median, and move on, without having checked the page once in between. When the metric is no longer a focus, click the bell again to stop the watch.

Getting the most from it

1. 1Watch the two or three metrics you are actively working, not everything, so your alerts stay meaningful.
2. 2On the Industry Data tab, watch the indicators for your own region as well as national when the two tell different stories.
3. 3When an alert arrives, open the metric's deep-dive to read the move in context before you act on it.
4. 4Stop watching a metric once it stops being a priority, so the watch list reflects what you actually care about now.

Watching is one small piece of how Verinode keeps you deciding instead of digging. As an independent data trust, it pools your data into anonymized peer benchmarks and never sells that data to carriers, which is what makes the number you are watching worth watching. For how to read a benchmark once an alert brings you back to it, see the benchmark deep-dive and reading a benchmark; for the wider surface, see the Benchmarks overview.