Data availability in health and care

Data is important to actuaries working within the health and care sector across the globe. Reliable data is crucial for analysis and in making informed business decisions. Many companies have internal datasets that they can use but they benefit from accessing data available from external sources.  

Key objectives

The aim of this working party is to identify datasets from across the globe that may be of value to actuaries working in health and care. This will include datasets that are e.g.:

• Publicly available (either with or without fee)
• Provided by private companies where a contract may be needed and use may be restricted
• Available in certain circumstances only e.g. by partnership with non-commercial entities

Key outputs:

• Establish criteria of what data sources should be included
• Identify different data sources, including by contacting and working with academia to find data sources available there
• Determine appropriate metrics to collect about these data sources
• Investigate how best to access the data if it is not readily available e.g. through partnerships, considering previous experiences of IFoA working parties. Summarise the findings
• Investigate different ways of cataloguing these data sources for easy reference and choose the most appropriate method
• Create the data catalogue.  For each health and care dataset identified, the catalogue should show e.g.:
  • Type of data (variables contained)
  • Potential applications
  • Size and duration of data 
  • Indication of data quality 
  • Costs/availability 
  • How best to access it, if not readily available 
  • Population covered
  • Limitations
• Propose how the catalogue will be kept up to date as a living document (for example, how someone could request a new data source is added).