Communications of the ACM
Insurers Test Data Profiles to Identify Risky Clients
Sizing up people's health risks to predict life spans.
Deloitte Consulting
Life insurers are testing an intensely personal new use for the vast dossiers of data being amassed about Americans: predicting people's longevity.
Insurers have long used blood and urine tests to assess people's health—a costly process. Today, however, data-gathering companies have such extensive files on most U.S. consumers—online shopping details, catalog purchases, magazine subscriptions, leisure activities and information from social-networking sites—that some insurers are exploring whether data can reveal nearly as much about a person as a lab analysis of their bodily fluids.
In one of the biggest tests, the U.S. arm of British insurer Aviva PLC looked at 60,000 recent insurance applicants. It found that a new, "predictive modeling" system, based partly on consumer-marketing data, was "persuasive" in its ability to mimic traditional techniques.
From The Wall Street Journal
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