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Health insurers working on data analytic skills for better pricing

Stronger data bank and data analytic skills will help health insurance companies in better underwriting of insurance policies, which includes understanding risk profiles and product pricing. Strong data bank will also ensure bringing down fraud in the system. Health insurance companies are working together to strengthen data analytic capabilities, said a FICCI report.

“From collecting internal data independently, insurers are now slowly moving towards data sharing on a collaborative basis. However, with the increase in the number of competitors, there is a need for insurers to think out of the box and make a gradual shift towards more advanced techniques in data analytics that can help take the Indian insurance business profitably into the future,” said FICCI.

The Effect of Predictive Analytics on the Homeowners’ Industry

Insurance executives are still grappling with an all-too-slowly recovering economy, declining returns on equity and increasing pressure to turn a profit any way they can and carriers offering Homeowners’ coverage face added volatility in light of recent catastrophic weather events like Superstorm Sandy.

In order to bring some balance to this equation, there is a growing need to better understand and manage risk in Homeowners’ insurance.

The numbers tell the story: According to A.M. Best and the Insurance Information Institute, Homeowners’ combined ratio swung from a high of 158.4 percent in 1992 to a low of 88.9 percent in 2006. The average combined ratio for Homeowners’ carriers from 2008-2011 is 113 percent, compared to 102 percent across all other P&C lines.

BIG DATA PREDICTIONS FOR 2013

Firms have taken to big data. Here are  Mike Gualtieri’s four predictions for key enterprise big data themes in 2013:

• Firms will realize that “big data” means all of their data.
• The algorithm wars will begin.
• Real-time architectures will swing to prominence.
• Naysayers will fall silent.

 India aims for world’s big data

Growing demand for big data skills will see companies looking to outsourcing to plug the gap, presenting opportunities for India. But, it must first address several fundamental challenges.

In its report “Big data: The next big thing”, Indian IT services industry group Nasscom expects the country’s big data industry to grow from US$200 million in 2012 to US$1 billion in 2015. The biggest challenge and opportunity is to satisfy the demand for data scientists. Avendus Capital, for one, estimates the United States will suffer a shortage of up to 200,000 data scientists by 2018, a gap that will most likely be filled by outsourcing.

Healthcare IT: The 4 Pillars Of Technical Innovation

Four major technology trends, which are becoming more intertwined every day, will dominate the healthcare IT landscape in 2013, according to IDC Health Insights’ top researcher, Scott Lundstrom.

These trends social media, cloud, big data and analytics, and mobility already are having a big impact on many healthcare provider and payer organizations, but CIOs will be faced with managing and deploying many of these technologies as their use becomes pervasive during the coming year. Lundstrom calls these tech trends the “four pillars” of healthcare IT and recently presented them during a keynote presentation at UBM Technology’sHealthcare IT Summit.

“By using technology we can go out and make a difference in the quality and cost of care,” Lundstrom told the CIOs gathered at the conference. “The answer to doing more with less in healthcare is getting closer to the patient with cloud, analytics, mobile, and social/unified communications.”

Big Data Analytics: Not Just for Big Business Anymore

So much data and so little business intelligence. That’s the irony of the information age, which is adding another 2.5 quintillion bytes to the data universe each day. Companies can either get buried by this avalanche of big data or use technology tools to mine its riches. This ability to access and analyze endless sources and types of structured and unstructured data such as social media chatter, commercial transactions, financial market data, GPS trails, genomics is revolutionizing marketing and transforming entire industries.

Because of its scope, big data has largely been the province of big businesses with big data centers. Large corporations have invested armies of data specialists and fantastic sums of money in big data. Those that harness big data can make highly data-driven business decisions, and respond and adapt to changing market conditions more quickly than their competitors. Marketing departments and ad agencies use big data to target customers with increasing granularity and accuracy.

Predictive analytics for performance management, the time is now

A long list of suppliers are flogging the concept of predictive analytics, that is the use of machine intelligence to sift through the massive, ever growing amount of log data operational systems generate, to predict problems before they occur so they can be resolved before the IT house of cards falls down. Is this a tool organizations can rely on or just the most recent catch phrase.