Description: This session will describe best practices for the preparation of the actuarial memorandum that supports the statement of actuarial opinion that is part of a health annual statement and review highlights of the new (2019) practice note on this topic. Presenters will represent different perspectives to discuss the components of an actuarial memorandum and use examples to present best practices and practical application of the information presented in the practice note.

Description: There will be a brief presentation on Section Activities and upcoming Annual Research Conference. This will include question /answers and suggestion for future activities. Then it will be a networking session.

Description: Critical Illness Insurance is one of the fastest growing insurance products available today. Carriers continue to introduce innovative approaches in second, third, and fourth generation products while refining their pricing, underwriting, and claims adjudication processes. This session will look back at historical trends using Gen Re's longstanding, comprehensive Critical Illness Market Survey, and look forward to potential market changes to occur in the next 18 months.

Description: While there are many approaches currently being taken to transform health care, to be successful, we know that leading and planning for quality improvement is a science. Data is the common denominator as healthcare organizations establish best-practices, and ultimately overcome unintended variation through strong analytic systems. Health care leaders require specialized data analysis education and training to hone their skills in understanding and managing clinical variation. The problem with unexplained variation in healthcare is that it negatively impacts clinical outcomes, increases the cost of care, and diminishes value for patients. In this session, Dr. Ted James (BIDMC and Harvard Medical School Faculty) will explain how actuaries can offer practical solutions that provide insights into variations in clinical practice that cannot be explained by differences in medical conditions or patient preferences.

Description: There has been a proliferation of proposals to expand access to public health insurance plans, either to strengthen insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or to replace the ACA marketplaces or other health insurance programs altogether. These proposals range from creating a public plan that would operate alongside private plans in the ACA marketplaces, to allowing individuals to buy into Medicare or Medicaid, to expanding Medicare to all. The terms used to describe these various options are often used interchangeably but they would be structured differently and have different impacts depending on the implementation details. Panelists at this session will discuss the general approaches for expanding access to public plans and their potential implications.

Description: "Visual storytelling is frequently used to effectively convey complex actuarial concepts to our clients and other audiences. When talking about data visualization, we often focus on the explanatory aspect. But data visualization is also a crucial tool in developing insights from large and complex data sets at every stage of data analytics spectrum: • descriptive (what happened?), • diagnostic (why it happened?), • predictive (what will happen?), • and prescriptive (how do I influence what will happen?). In exploratory and modeling stages of data analytics’ project, we let the data tell the story or explore our intuition and hypothesis through data pictures. We demonstrate the power of visual display in healthcare data analytics through vivid examples from the healthcare case studies. These illustrations of data visualization exploratory power range from assessing the quality of data or examining outliers, to exploring variables’ relationships and trends, to hypothesis testing, to guiding in feature selection and models’ comparison and evaluation, to model validation. Throughout these illustrations, we will discuss principles of graphical effectiveness, excellence and integrity."

Description: In late 2018, the Society of Actuaries held a long-term care medical symposium. This meeting assembled a small group of medical experts to discuss the key medical issues facing the aging population with a focus on their impact on long-term care insurance. This session will provide an overview of the symposium, key outcomes and next steps for future updates.

Description: CMS provides a significant, and growing amount of information that can be leveraged by actuaries. Between the public use and research files CMS makes publicly available large amounts of information that can be assimilated to begin to understand the who, what, when, where, and how of Medicare. This session will focus on the depth and breadth of data available, summarize any restrictions on the use of the data, and identify areas where access to the new data can provide more meaningful insights than CMS's historical data sets.

Description: A panel of practicing actuaries and policy analysts will discuss the 'big issues' that could affect the actuarial profession in the future, and suggest ideas on how the actuarial profession could adapt to these challenges. This will be an interactive session where attendees can expect to have an opportunity to weigh in through polling questions and discussion. Topics touched will include: socialized medicine, artificial intelligence, the competition from data scientists, data commoditization, disruption from new entrants into the healthcare insurance space, and more.

Description: While medical and pharmacy claims data is a well-established source for healthcare analytics, significant data can be found elsewhere in electronic medical records (EMRs) and in hospital admit, discharge, and transfer (ADT) messages. Increasing availability of bulk EMR data to analyze coupled with more powerful and specialized tools for analyzing it presents an opportunity for actuaries to incorporate these sources in their work. This session will take a look at some of the data available beyond claims in EMRs and HL7 ADT messages, and will discuss case studies, with consideration around structure, ease of use, cleanliness, and tools available for analyzing these data types including natural language processing.