The Challenge
The quality and quantity of information about disease burden and outcomes varies broadly around the world. In some markets and in some disease areas, reinsurance companies have robust experience studies and industry resources to inform their assumption setting. In many other areas, datasets and experience data may exist, but may not be reliable, or may not even exist in the forms that reinsurance companies are accustomed to using. Finding metrics to fill out these blanks and to evaluate and validate the available data sources, is a challenge that needs to be addressed to optimize business outcomes globally.
The quality and quantity of information about disease burden and outcomes varies broadly around the world. In some markets and in some disease areas, reinsurance companies have robust experience studies and industry resources to inform their assumption setting. In many other areas, datasets and experience data may exist, but may not be reliable, or may not even exist in the forms that reinsurance companies are accustomed to using. Finding metrics to fill out these blanks and to evaluate and validate the available data sources, is a challenge that needs to be addressed to optimize business outcomes globally.
IHME Client Services Role
Through licensing IHME’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data, a global reinsurance company addressed critical data gaps and gained strategic insights to support decision-making across markets:
Through licensing IHME’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data, a global reinsurance company addressed critical data gaps and gained strategic insights to support decision-making across markets:
- Benchmark for Enhanced Reliability: They leverage IHME data as a robust benchmark to evaluate the reliability and completeness of third-party healthcare datasets. By providing comparable metrics, IHME data supports the refinement of internal models, ensuring greater accuracy and trustworthiness in healthcare insights.
- Break into New Markets: Entering emerging markets often means limited-to-no experience data, presenting significant challenges. IHME data is a vital supplement to bridge these gaps, enabling more reliable assumptions and analyses. These data resources facilitate informed decision-making, reducing uncertainty in new or underdeveloped markets.
- Increased value of existing data resources: IHME’s data can be layered on to other data sets to make them more broadly applicable. Examining the relative prevalence of disease across markets enables experience data in one location to be applied in another. Similarly, understanding the relative incidence of different diseases within the same demographic group supports product development, adding coverage for additional disease areas.
- Anticipate Emerging Health Threats: IHME’s scenario-based forecasts offer critical insights into potential health threats and emerging diseases. These forecasts provide a level of granularity often lacking in insured data, helping stakeholders prepare for and respond to future challenges effectively.
- Plan for new treatments: Innovations in medical treatments are happening quickly, and can be very expensive, having significant implications for future health outcomes, expectations as well as costs of care. IHME data is used to understand the exposure to diseases for which these new treatments will be relevant.