Description: Health care has changed rapidly over the past couple of years. The pandemic has shifted consumer behavior in how and where they receive health care as well as consumer attitudes toward health care. Payers continue to design innovative solutions in responses to their patient’s needs and expectations. These changes in consumer behaviors and the responses by payers are expected to impact both health care cost and utilization. Discuss changes in health care that have emerged due to the pandemic and how they are expected to influence actuarial assumptions. Explore epidemiological models commonly used in the industry, the considerations when using these models, as well as the challenges with regards to gathering and interpreting relevant experience data. By attending this session, you will be able to: Identify shifts in consumer behavior that have emerged from the pandemic and describe how payers are responding to new patient expectations. Discuss how these post-pandemic changes by consumers and payers influence medical spending. Determine which actuarial assumptions are impacted and how and if the impact is expected to be temporary or permanent. Discuss considerations taken by actuaries and challenges faced when modelling actuarial assumptions post pandemic.

Description: What is a vitagion? Is there such thing as catastrophic longevity? What does a 1 in 200 year mortality loss event look like? How might actuaries use mortality scenarios in their practice? Explore how to move beyond simplistic stress testing with singular percentage shocks to building a robust set of information, derived from stochastically generated scenarios for longevity and excess mortality outcomes. This data can inform assumption setting, longevity swaps, capital levels, and risk management. These concepts apply to life insurers, pension actuaries, and reinsurers. By attending the session, you will: - Understand what is a loss exceedance curve is and how it may be useful to quantify tail risks. - Comprehend how to incorporate stochastic variability into longevity and excess mortality assumptions. - Find out what elements go into a stochastic prediction of extreme mortality events using nested models. - Learn how to add more depth to youractuarial assumptions.

Description: As effective dates for major changes in insurance accounting are rapidly approaching, insurers find themselves at various stages of their implementation programs. Driven by the need for compliance and desire for operational excellence, companies are transforming by reimagining their processes, leveraging technology enablers, redefining roles and responsibilities, and enhancing risk management, governance, and controls. Companies that proactively include risk and control elements in their accounting change implementation programs benefit from improved outcomes, enhanced investment returns, early identification, and mitigating of risk. Focus on risk and controls considerations around accounting change programs and how strategic partnerships with internal audit and ERM groups can benefit these significant transformation programs. By attending the session, you will: Be able to articulate key considerations around risk and controls for accounting change implementation programs.

Description: Recent and potential near future extreme experiences are leading us to a new normal rather than back to the prior environment. Learn more about several examples of past Regime Changes along with a detailed discussion of how recent disruptions lead toward a persistent change in the business, social and political environment. Come develop an understanding of these drivers of change as well as the likely impacts on the Financial Services industry.

Description: Hear about some applications using quantile regression-derived individual and group claim distributions and how they may be used in various traditional health care modeling situations. The session will not focus on the technical use of quantile regression to obtain estimates of claim distributions, but more so is intended to focus on the uses of the distributions in actuarial modeling and the additive framework in assessing claims distributions. Presenters will show how actuaries can better assess risks by focusing on the individual- and group-specific claims distributions as opposed to traditional point-estimate-centric models.

Description: Back in the day, when data was scarce and computers were slow, actuaries were forced to use simple methods to account for risk. By far, the most common method was to add a margin, usually 5% to a “best estimate” calculation. Remarkedly, this method still works quite well in the aggregate. The problem is that, in many cases, decisions today require a more in-depth analysis. For example, how big a risk is a health plan really taking if it lowers its premiums by 10% to attract more members? This session will discuss techniques for measuring risk in today’s environment. Speakers will also share the results from the 5/50 research project, which forms the foundation for the techniques.

Description: It has been a little over a year since the release of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute's Mortality Improvement Model, MIM-2021. Since then, waves of COVID-19 have continued to occur in the U.S. The uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic and the slowing of U.S. general population mortality improvement prior to the pandemic are just a few of the reasons that make developing MI projection scales difficult. Uncoverthe results from intercompany surveys on mortality improvement, including one that addresses COVID-19, discover insights from a mortality expert panel on COVID-19 and future mortality, and discuss enhancements to MIM-2021. By attending the session, you will: - Understand MIM-2021 and 2022 enhancements. - Understand SOA Research Institute activities around COVID-19 and impact on mortality improvement. - Apply research results and insights presented to daily work.

Description: "Hear AM Best rating analysts discuss the rating process and the best capital adequacy ratio (BCAR), a quantitative foundation for AM Best’s assessment of carriers’ financial strength. The benchmarking of BCAR scores for various company types (national MCOs, BCBS plans, smaller regional plans) will be discussed. Look at how changes in investment and underwriting environment impacted the results over the past several years. Further, AM Best’s view of the quality of capital and various factors impacting the overall assessment of the balance sheet strength will be discussed. By attending this session, you will: Gain an understanding of AM Best’s building block approach to ratings and how the BCAR results fit into the process. Learn the differences between RBC and BCAR models. Learn how various factors—e.g. liquidity, financial flexibility, financial leverage, the org structure—impact the final AM Best assessment of health companies' capital."

Description: With the mandated health plan transparency files, health plans and providers are now able to substantially enhance their provider contracting efforts. Although the files are large and cumbersome they are market disruptors and provide new insights for provider contracting efforts. Explore a demonstration on the type of information now available and how it can be used to enhance this from both a health plan and health care provider perspective.

Description: The frequent use and complexity of today's actuarial projection models has increased the importance of having efficient models. Model optimization can reduce both cloud costs and overall end-to-end clock times, thereby allowing companies to do more with less such as reducing close times, increasing controls, enhancing analysis, doing more complicated calculations, and/or improving employee workloads during the close. From design and data to execution and audit, come explore techniques that can be applied throughout the actuarial modeling process to optimize actuarial models for improved run-time, accuracy, and reliability. There will be a focus on techniques that don't rely on model compression. Topics covered include model design pitfalls, data handling, improving convergence on asset-liability projections, strategies for interacting with the cloud, and other tips for optimizing actuarial models.