Description: Mental health spending has reached $147 billion in the United States with demand only increasing greatly impacting society as nearly 1 in 5 experience these issues. There are even more indirect costs associated with mental health causing a national crisis surpassing 1 percent of the GDP. These costs coupled with the severe lack of licensed clinicians calls for an innovative solution. Through years of development and completion of a randomized controlled trial, Prevail has built and validated a low-cost, scalable solution. Prevail's clinically proven digital mental health treatment provides increased access to care while reducing overall health costs. Private and public payors should being reimbursing this model and offering it to their members.

Description: Discussion of direct primary care and how it helps with several challenges in health care today. DPC improves care coordination, improves outcomes, improves doctor and patient satisfaction, and reduces spending. DPC successes promote the view that primary care should not be covered by insurance; rather, it should be paid for directly.

Description: Open meeting of the Society's Health Benefit Systems Practice Advancement Committee and Health Section Council, as well as the American Academy of Actuaries' Health Practice Council. The three committees review ongoing projects in the Health Practice area. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: New research shows that we often make sub-optimal choices, when selecting a health insurance plan, that lead to unnecessary out-of-pocket expenditu

Description: Presenter examines federal and state efforts at parity in the area of mental health insurance. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Numerous behavioral finance theories have emerged in recent years, many of which apply to insurance. The presenters look at key theories and their use in explaining, predicting and inducing behavior from the perspective of the health insurance customer journey.

Description: Health care is a complex market with a wide variety of stakeholders. These stakeholders have diverse business needs, requiring complicated data-driven decisions. The analytics and research supporting these decisions are often dependent on the availability of real-world data (RWD), which includes a wide variety of data capture technology and data reflecting treatment, clinical outcomes, and costs of health care in real treatment settings (e.g.,, outside of controlled clinical trials). The goal of this panel discussion is to explore how existing and emerging sources of RWD can enhance benefit design, improve risk assessment, influence treatment decisions, and advance the measurement of clinical, humanistic, and financial outcomes. The diverse speaker panel includes actuarial and non-actuarial perspectives, representing the pharmaceutical industry, a health-care services business, and academia. The panel will describe the decision-making that drives their individual needs to use RWD, identify current and developing RWD sources, provide examples of analyses using RWD, and discuss how emerging RWD may influence actuarial analytics and potentiate the development of new interdisciplinary methods and value drivers.

Description: This session discussion is about two proposals for health-care reform will be presented, one from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association and one from the Council for Affordable Health Care. These dramatically different proposals will be compared and open for critique. From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 18, No. 4A.

Description: Evaluation of Taiwan's National Health insurance program and a discussion of a managed competition model to reform it.