Description: Realizing the impact of medical errors on the U.S. health care system, the Health Section commissioned a research project to measure the annual frequency of medical errors and their total measurable direct and indirect cost to the economy.

Description: Chapter 1 presents the background to the current study, followed by the methodology used, and a summary of the findings of the study. From Group Medical Insurance Large Claims Database Collection and Analysis, M-HB97-1.

Description: Four appendices are attached to the monograph: a letter requesting information, two letters requesting participation, and a set of general database specifications. From Group Medical Insurance Large Claims Database Collections and Analysis, M-HB97-1.

Description: The purpose of this SOA-sponsored research was to assemble and analyze a limited large claims database which may serve as a model for expanded inter-company studies of health care benefits in the future. From Group Medical Insurance Large Claims Database Collection and Analysis, M-HB97-1.

Description: An economic analysis of bariatric surgery and health care costs supports the case for health plans to cover these procedures.

Description: The author describes a recent LIMRA study of agent terminations. The article describes the assumptions and methods used in the study, and provides a table comparing the results of this study, called the Brzezinski 1979 Agent Termination Tables, with agent termination rates derived from previous studies.

Description: This article discusses a study of the impact of the drug infliximab on Crohn's disease patients. This study had been approved in response to an SOA request for proposals for research on the health cost and utilization effects of a specific prescription drug.

Description: Matrix decomposition techniques are used to find main features of a dataset. These features can be used to describe the data or to find clusters of objects. The decompositions have problems when the matrices have missing data or are from different exposures. This article examines the issue and some papers dealing with it.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.