Description: The Minnesota Cognitive Acuity Screen MCAS is a brief cognitive screen that has been validated to correctly identify mild to moderate cognitive impairment in 98.1 percent of all cases. The MCAS has been in use in the LTCI industry for more than five years, and has shown excellent results in reducing early cognitive claims.

Description: Medical management programs have traditionally addressed more acute and short-term issues with chronic disease. As LTC becomes an important product in the insurance industry, including disease management is likely to be valuable for reducing costs and prolonging the healthy, premium-paying portion of a claimant's life.

Description: A discussion of the efforts to implement straight through processing and standardization of the HIPAA form for long term care claims data.

Description: A discussion of insurance claims processing and payment systems, and how to achieve the minimum possible number of errors.

Description: For a long time the primary focus of private LTC insurance companies has been to educate the public about the need for private LTC insurance and to make the product more acceptable to a wider population. To this end there have been numerous changes to the product design to make this product more acceptable to general population. However, one of the things that may have been overlooked in those product design changes is the need for alignment of policyholder and insurance company’s interests, which is to make coverage more affordable and to reduce adverse selection. Incentivizing good behavior from policyholders can not only make LTC insurance policies less expensive but also help policyholders make better health choices, which can help them stay healthy for a longer time. These incentives may also reduce some of the inherent risks in a long term care policy and may help in increasing the sales of private LTC insurance.

Description: This interview provides information on Retirement Health and Happiness, the first in a new series of publications designed to improve retirement literacy.

Description: Using the Cox proportional Hazards Model to improve underwriting debits and credits.

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

Description: May 2013 issue of the Health Watch newsletter

Description: This article summarizes some of the operational considerations necessary to optimize the usefulness and impact of a predictive model, such as cross-functional support and involvement in model build, adequate training and reporting, and strategic model build.