Data and information management

Given the tough pricing environment, skittish capital markets and litany of catastrophe losses seen in 2011, it’s hard to regard the present as a golden age for reinsurers.

Humana Inc. has acquired Anvita Health, a health care analytics company. Humana uses Anvita's Insight engine currently; Anvita Health will continue to operate independently as a subsidiary of Humana.

Experts say thanks to a dearth of Federal support, it isn’t a stretch to imagine a power grid cyber attack that takes out the Internet, grinding communications and businesses to a halt in the process.

ingenie is a new online car insurance brand targeting young drivers in the United Kingdom, aged 17 to 25, who have been priced off the road by rocketing car insurance costs. Those costs have seen the 17 to 22 age bracket now paying a typical annual premium of £2,431 ($3,805), up 64 percent when compared to 2010 figures.

In 2012, the U.S. life and annuity insurance industry will be challenged to find ways to manage both capital and risk in an economically and politically uncertain year, while continuing to lay the groundwork for future growth, according to Ernst & Young's new Global Insurance Center U.S. Outlook report.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has issued a final rule to make available standardized extracts of Medicare claims data to facilitate measuring the performance of providers and suppliers. The rule has significant changes that enable use of clinical data along with the claims data.

As a teetering Euro threatens more disruption in world financial markets, a new survey reveals widespread concern among those responsible for risk management at U.K.-based insurance companies.

One-third of office-based physicians have a "basic" electronic health records or electronic medical records system, according to preliminary figures from the federal 2011 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

Even though they know it’s dangerous and, depending where they are, against the law, drivers continue to text behind the wheel, and Allstate Insurance Co. and Manitoba Public Insurance are doing their part to put an end to it.

Property/casualty insurers may well be relieved that the 2011 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially ended this week. This year, the season counted 19 tropical storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes (Category 3 or above on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) resulting in insurance claims.

To fully exploit business analytics, carriers must supplement their internal policy-level data with a variety of data points derived from external sources. To get a sense of how insurers can best harmonize exogenous data with existing business processes, Insurance Networking News checked in with Bill Madison, SVP insurance data solutions for Lexis/Nexis.

1. Risk Management/ Climate Control

With the onslaught of Big Data and more sophisticated business intelligence and analytics, data quality will be more important than ever to insurers in 2012. The experts say you can't get there without clean, accessible data. Poor contact data affects a variety of operations, from underwriting to policy service. But from a cost perspective, inaccurate contact data can have a significant impact on insurers. In a September 2011 report "Why is Data Quality Important for Insurers?" Deloitte lists four reasons:

Life insurers need to craft mitigation strategies for a prolonged low-rate environment.

Fraud is on the rise in the United States and globally, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2011 Global Economic Crime Survey, with cyber crime making the most significant increase in the two years since the firm’s last survey.

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has released the latest version of its ARC Logics for Financial Services offering. The enterprise risk management (ERM) solution suite draws upon actionable, industry-specific regulatory intelligence and Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ domain expertise. Wolters says this helps financial organizations bring transparency, traceability and efficiency to managing compliance, operational and financial risks as well as to the audit function.

A recent study of IT spending among small businesses (from $40 million to $350 million in annual revenue) reveals that the budgets will grow slowly. The report—“IT spending and staffing forecast for 2012”— from Computer Economics predicts IT operational budgets should grow about 2.0 percent at the median for small organizations and 0.5 percent for medium ($350 million to $1 billion in revenue) and 0.8 percent for large (revenue of $1 billion or greater) organizations. Growth in the financial services sector, including banks and insurance companies, is weaker than other sectors—health care, professional and technical services, and distribution and manufacturing—but the net trend is still positive.

Where do you draw the line between distributed servers and mainframes? Is there even a line anymore?

Recent suit filed in Sacramento should serve as a reminder that when it comes securing data, there is no room for error.

Sponsored by Swiss Re, a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) finds risk management practices surrounding renewable energy projects wanting.