Description: Is your development team or IT staff growing tired of last-minute requests to include additional functionality? Have you strained to explain challenging actuarial topics to non-actuarial staff for implementation? Do your teams find themselves revisiting deadlines & timelines when building solutions? During this interactive panel discussion, three technologists (two software engineering managers and one data scientist) along with three actuaries will discuss real world problems and approaches using experience from previous projects. Although the challenge of running efficient software teams is not unique to actuarial science, this webcast will discuss best practices on how to organize teams to reduce friction and context switching. Presenters will also explore unique actuarial challenges and concepts including how to address standards on data quality when building software, how to build intuitive software that meets actuarial standards and how test-driven development makes it easier to meet actuarial standards of practice.

Description: Level funded products often target the small group market (2-50) and can result in many manual and tedious processes for underwriting to perform risk assessment. Learn how a carrier used technology to help automate risk assessment without the need for paper medical questionnaires, and exposed a risk engine for broker quoting to enable near real-time of pricing for risk-based products. The approach reduced labor and allowed underwriting to focus solely on fallout cases while also improving pricing consistency. Discuss broader trends in the health market for risk assessment, including new machine learning cost predictions that can be used for automation and better predictions of future costs. Discussion topics will include underwriting guidelines, business rules, risk scores, and machine learning. By attending this session, you will have a better idea of new trends in risk assessment for small groups where no claims experience is available. And, better understand business rules that are common in underwriting for flags for review as well as how risk scores and machine learning can be used during the underwriting process.

Description: Every patient leaving the hospital has personal life-context circumstances that impact their chances of successful recovery and complications can be costly. Complex care management impacts over 50 percent of health care spend, with the admitted commercial population driving 37 percent of spend or $177M per 100,000 lives and the Medicare population driving 53 percent of spend or $600 million per 100,000 lives. The stakes are high, but existing care management solutions are mostly clinical and navigation call centers provide fragmented and outdated patient management systems, and do not address individual life-context. Discharged patients therefore remain underengaged and undercompliant, leading to costly complications. Innovative technology can help enable and integrate systems and existing infrastructure to leverage evidence-based contextualized care that will enhance care management, improve efficiency, and drive a better experience and outcomes for patients. This technology helps codifies life context, dynamically stratifying and engaging members digitally and telephonically helping virtual care teams to be more effective and efficient. In a recent randomized clinical trial, this technology and approach has shown a 50 percent reduction in the total cost of care, cutting the average and total cost of readmission, increasing virtual care team impact and member engagement and trust.

Description: Asset liability management is an important task for any insurer, where tools like Excel play an important role from an analytics perspective. Dashboard tools like Power Bi and Tableau can supercharge an organization’s ability to perform ALM with real-time precision and monitoring of risk/imbalances. The dashboard can provide insights into potential risks posed by asset allocation and concentration, allowing for informed decision-making to mitigate those risks. The presenters will walk the audience through an example of ALM use case, including how to build key performance indicators such as cash flow, asset allocation, and risk exposure. Additionally, we will demonstrate how these types of dashboards can be customized to fit the specific needs of your organization.

Description: Ensuring employees retire with adequate benefits is an ever-growing challenge. During this webcast, we will highlight key insights from the fields of behavioral economics and data analytics that can be utilized to better equip employees for retirement. Areas of focus will include inherent biases that people exhibit and how employers can use these biases to design plan features that will nudge their employees towards making better decisions for their futures.

Description: The famous 80/20 rule in data science states that only 20% of your time working with data is spent driving insightful business analytics. The rest of your time is spent trying to query, clean and organize your data. Even with this knowledge, the majority of actuarial training/focus is on the 20 percent. This session takes a different approach, focusing solely on speeding up your work on the other 80 percent. Practical examples will be part of a code walkthrough in R.

Description: This session series is sponsored by Zelis Claim analytics produces valuable insights about provider cost, quality, and referral patterns. Provider networks can be created around high-value providers to improve clinical outcomes while lowering the cost of care. Programs to improve provider performance and/or incentivize members to choose high-value providers exist, but how do you bring all of this together to achieve desired outcomes? Join us to learn how to leverage provider level analytics to build and optimize a network with high-value providers at the center. Analyze the network for competitiveness and adequacy and demonstrate progress toward network cost saving goals to key stakeholders by modeling claim data for a member population. Finally, ensure the success of your network through an incentive program that shifts utilization to those high performing providers. By attending this session, you will be able to: - Build a realistic provider network with high-value providers at the center. - Evaluate the overall financial impact of network build and optimization efforts. - Learn about an innovative member incentive program.

Description: As technology continues to improve, the actuarial profession is challenged by the tremendous potential benefits of new technology and the concurrent creation of new risks that accompany it. Technology should enable good work products that meet strict deadlines, deliver meaningful information to regulators and shareholders, and inform management teams about opportunities to develop our businesses. Answering questions about what technology we might use and how it can aid in making the best investment in our operations is key to making value proposition arguments to support the adoption of new technology in the workplace. Learn practical examples of automation as it's applied in actuarial practice, a potential composition of the actuarial toolkit and the business of managing the use of automation. Advance the state of your workplace art through several angles of this topic as: - Categories and purposes of several kinds of automation and supporting tools that might be used in actuarial practice - How management messaging and culture affects the way automation tools are used and how technical risks are managed - Implementing automation based on the presented case studies

Description: Digital savvy consumers are demanding a change in the way they engage with their insurance carriers. As smartphone owners utilize their devices for financial management more than ever, insurance carriers aim to create a similar seamless digital strategy, offering customers a personalized experience on multiple platforms. Cloud-based applications also enable productivity, accountability and innovation in the insurance industry. Discover avenues of customer engagement through digital platforms, including new technologies and products, and why the value of data and data science is critical for business, such as adaptability, marketing and insightful pricing. Presenters will also touch on: - managing retention and lapses through data-driven continuous improvement cycling - high-level system architectures illustrating how multiple applications (front/mid/back office systems) will integrate with each other and share connected data example data points being captured within various marketing systems - data collection within various digital platforms - data science applications that help with business growth, retention, lapsation, effectiveness and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, and the implications to actuarial functions - value and risk to carriers in the new digital paradigm

Description: Almost every actuary will, at some point in their career, be called upon to perform work described as business as usual (BAU). BAU work takes on many forms, ranging from daily pricing or hedging exercises to annual valuation or audit support and nearly everything in between, however, a common thread among most BAU activities is that unusual issues have a tendency to arise, resulting in inefficiencies, long hours, and sometimes missed deadlines. Learn from a panel of actuaries that will relate tales of unusual issues that derailed BAU routines. Examine how these issues arose, the impact they had on the actuary's work and life, and steps that could prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, with a focus on governance, controls, and analytics. By attending the session, you will: Understand some of the common pitfalls that can interfere with smooth BAU operations, as well as some strategies that can be employed to mitigate or prevent issues in their own BAU work.