Description: Data is at the core of the actuaries' role within companies, but how can actuaries translate data insights into informed and actionable decision making? The key is communicating data insights into a language that transcends analysis and enables real-time decisions that can provide an advantage to your management team. Learn an approach to choosing a tool or medium for your data insights, questions to ask yourself to better understand the communication necessary, and perspectives on how actuaries can take a larger role in actionable decisions within the industry. Understand availability, quality, and practical application of data sources health actuaries can access easily, how that data looks, approaches to transforming data into decisions, how it enriches administrative and claims data, and applications to pricing and reserving. Finally, discuss implications of ASOP 23, ASOP 41, and ASOP 56 as it relates to this topic. By attending this session, you will be able to: - Create an action plan on how to transform data into messaging for your leaders. - Use real experiences to formulate a strategy to expand the actuaries' role in informing decisions within the industry, including examples, to illustrate how data can benefit financials of health coverages. - Understand the application of ASOP 23 (Data), ASOP 41 (Communication), and ASOP 56 (Modeling) as it relates to turning data into decisions. - Be knowledgeable about new sources of morbidity for medical care and LTC and how to acquire and apply this information in actuarial models.

Description: Slides from a panel discussion session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 Discussion of the basics of actuarial appraisals: Panelists discussed the reasons to perform an actuarial appraisal, the processes involved, issues that should be addressed and assumption development.

Description: This report provides a toolkit for actuaries and other interested parties to model and forecast mortality by cause and socioeconomic factors.

Description: This paper describes risk-factor-dependent multiple decrements and actuarial cost functions as a general compartment model, a discrete time and discrete state stochastic model of morbidity and mortality processes. For large numbers of risk factors, the model is extended to its natural continuous time and state form. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1991, Vol. 43.

Description: Read the December 2016 issue of The Modeling Platform published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

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: Regression to the mean (RTTM) is inflating your health care intervention evaluations if you are not carefully managing it's omnipresent and significant impact RTTM is the statistical phenomenon which arises when comparing sequential data points when an initial observation is extreme or an outlier, and states that with no other intervention, future observations will be closer to the average. Members who had high costs last year will, on average, have lower costs this year, even in the absence of any intervention or clinical program, simply by 'regressing' to the mean. This means that if your clinical programs are simply targeting members who had adverse medical experience last year, you’re targeting the wrong people. And if your savings methodologies are simply last year’s costs minus this year’s costs, the savings are inflated. By attending this session, you will be able to identify situations where RTTM will be a significant factor, how to eliminate it's impact when performing retrospective evaluations, how to identify prospects for clinical intervention with RTTM in mind, and more.

Description: Recent research from Financial Finesse introduces a viable way to forecast the potential return on investment (ROI) of workplace financial wellness programs.

Description: The Product Development Section, the Financial Reporting Section, the Modeling Section and the Committee on Life Insurance Research are pleased to present new research on modeling and forecasting cause-of-death mortality. Authored by a Milliman team led by Alexandre Boumezoued, the report develops a framework for forecasting cause specific death rates. Included also is a Cause of Deaths Forecasting Tool and a user guide for the tool.