Description: Electronic Health Records, or EHRs, are a major worldwide initiative to eliminate paper recordings – including Attending Physician Statements (APSs) – of an individual’s medical history and current treatment.

Description: The Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) recently released their annual health care cost and utilization report on February 13, 2020. This report illustrates employer group commercial health care costs and trends from 2014 – 2018.

Description: This report examines lapse experience on individual disability income insurance products by various policyholder and product factors. The study can be used for industry benchmarking as well as for background information for product development and planning purposes.

Description: Chris Smith, vice chair of the Actuary of the Future section, had the privilege of attending the SOA Health meeting in Seattle for the first time this year. Read about his experience and thoughts on why you should plan to attend an SOA-sponsored conference for your career growth.

Description: The document is a research call for proposals seeking researchers to produce a report on the uses of synthetic medical claims data for actuaries. It outlines the background, purpose, research objectives, proposal requirements, selection process, and conditions for submission.

Description: This study would assess the impact of recent patient care innovation(s) on health care and the health insurance industry.

Description: The SOA is seeking researchers to explore considerations within the LGBTQ+ community impacting employer-based health benefit designs. Review details on the background, research objectives, proposal requirements, selection process, submission guidelines, and project conditions.

Description: This report is presented in the form of a Tableau dashboard and is the sixth public release from this report series and contains the results of an excess mortality analysis for the fourth quarter of 2021. Data from 30 companies representing approximately 69% of the industry’s face amount inforce were included in the analyses in this report. A total of 3.2 million death claims from individual life policies from 2015 through December 31, 2021 make up the basis of the analyses. The report also compares the experience under COVID-19 of the insured population versus the general population.

Description: LIMRA, Reinsurance Group of America (RGA), the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute, and TAI have collaborated on an ongoing effort to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the individual life insurance industry’s mortality experience and share the emerging results with the insurance industry and the public. This report documents a high-level analysis of the claims that have been reported.

Description: In the past months, as COVID-19 has forced the reduced activity in the U.S. economy there has been some very substantial, but varied effects on the U.S. healthcare system. There is a lot of potential for confusion amongst providers and patients with regards to decisions related to which services ought to be rendered and which ought to be deferred. Two specific agencies – the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) have put together some guidance to add more clarity towards what types of services should be provided and what types ought to be deferred. In addition, this paper includes a discussion on what types of services are most likely to be deferred, and which ones will accrue pent-up demand to be released when many of the deferred services become available again.