Professional Development
The Health Section offers many on-going education opportunities, such as meeting sessions, web series, stand-alone webcasts and podcasts.
- Meeting sessions are offered as part of one of our three major meetings each year: The SOA Health Meeting, the SOA Valuation Actuary Meeting, and the SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit. Meetings offer attendees a menu of sessions on a variety of topics for a single fee.
- On the other hand, with a web series, the attendee can attend multiple sessions relating to a common theme for a single fee. As the name implies, stand-alone webcasts are single sessions for a specific topic.
For a complete list of upcoming events, visit the SOA Calendar. The list of presentations can be found in the Health Section Community of SOA Engage. In addition, presentations from past in-person events are available to the public and recordings of the session are available for purchase.
Marketplace Relevance
The Health Section uses strategic initiatives as the primary tool for expanding marketplace relevance for health actuaries. Each strategic initiative provides an on-demand source of information and a framework for further discussion on a topic of interest to health actuaries and, in many cases, to the larger health community. The key strategic initiatives include:
- Managed Care 3.0 Technology. In recent years, technology has changed the delivery of health care. This strategic initiative describes those changes and the key factors actuaries most consider in reflecting these changes in their day to day work.
- Actuarial Perspectives on Prescription Drug Financing. The one thing that Democrats, Republicans and Independents agree on is that prescription drug costs are too high. This strategic initiative provides some much-needed transparency to this important topic.
- Value-Based Care. Currently, roughly 1/3 of all care is reimbursed using a value-based reimbursement method, which holds the provider directly accountable for quality and efficiency, at least to some extent. This strategic initiative provides a framework for exploring the many inter-related components of value-based care, and produced this report.
- The ACA@10. Published on the 10thanniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this initiative provides an analysis of the successes and unintended consequences of the ACA. This initiative included a quantitative research project Fifty States, Fifty Stories: A Decade of Health Care Reform Under the ACA. This strategic initiative was a follow-up to an earlier one The ACA@5: An Actuarial Retrospective.
- Initiative 18/11: What Can We Do About the Cost of Health Care?Health care in the U.S. is about 18% of our GDP compared to only 11% in comparable countries. In 2018, the SOA and the Kaiser Family Foundation, held a day-long conference with over 30 leaders in the health care community to discuss the cost of health care in the United States and potential solutions. After the release of the conference report, the Health Section Council launched several follow-up projects, including the prescription drug initiative described above and a project known as Managed Care 3.0, which will explore the next generation of health care. We now have two additional partners for this initiative: the HealthCare Finance Management Association and the Conference of Consulting Actuaries. Members of the 18/11 planning meeting have also presented on this topic at many actuarial and non-actuarial meetings.
- Public Health. This strategic initiative was the culmination of the work done by the Public Health Task Force, which introduced the importance of Public Health to actuaries and began forging alliances with non-actuarial organizations. This initiative provides information on key public health topics like the opioid epidemic and the Oregon Medicaid transformation.