The Actuarial Time Crisis

Ask any healthcare actuary how they spend their working hours, and you'll likely hear a startling admission. As Frank revealed, "Depending on the week, actuaries are spending up to 90% of their time essentially managing, running local data models, cleaning data, curating data, and creating new metrics."

This means that highly trained actuarial professionals - whose expertise is crucial for risk assessment, pricing strategy, and value-based care management - are functioning primarily as data engineers. The result? Only 10-20% of their time is dedicated to the strategic analysis that delivers real business value.

Introducing Accorded Acumen: Designed for Actuarial Teams

Accorded's data management platform, Acumen, directly addresses this productivity crisis. As Frank describes it, "Acumen is a data platform as a service that manages the data layer for analytics teams."

What sets Acumen apart is its deep understanding of actuarial workflows and data needs. Unlike generic data platforms, Acumen is built specifically to:

• Automate data preparation processes that typically consume most of an actuary's time
• Apply actuarial-specific business logic and adjustments at the data layer
• Integrate seamlessly with existing actuarial tools and workflows
• Deliver analytics-ready data that meets the high standards actuaries require

"What was missing from the traditional IT data stack," Frank explained, "was a data engineering team that knew the downstream use cases well enough to programmatically apply those improvements and business logic within the data stack itself."

Measurable Productivity Gains for Actuarial Teams

Healthcare organizations implementing Acumen are seeing dramatic shifts in how their actuarial teams allocate their time:

• From 80% data wrangling to 80% strategic analysis
• From months- or weeks-long turnaround times to days or even hours
• From repetitive manual processes to consistent, automated workflows

This transformation enables actuarial and analytics teams to provide faster, more responsive analysis for value-based care contracts, risk management, pricing, and other critical business functions.

Beyond Value-Based Care: Applications Across Healthcare Analytics

While Accorded initially focused on value-based care analytics, Acumen's capabilities extend to any healthcare organization with actuarial and analytics teams. As Frank noted, "You have lots of companies that are still in the fee-for-service world that have very large analytics teams internally, that are also spending a lot of their time just doing a lot of rote data grunt work."

The platform is particularly valuable for:

• Health plans looking to maximize the effectiveness of their actuarial departments
• Provider organizations managing risk contracts who need robust analytical capabilities
• Healthcare startups that need enterprise-grade actuarial insights without building large teams
• Consulting firms seeking to deliver higher value at competitive price points

Quality and Trust Built Into the Platform

What truly differentiates Acumen is its foundation in actuarial domain expertise and modern data engineering. The platform integrates:

• Reference data for quality assurance and reasonability checks
• Claims and eligibility data processing with built-in validation
• Clinical data integration for more comprehensive analysis
• Cross-source validation to identify gaps and errors before they impact analysis

"We use reference data to ensure that the data we're receiving from our customers are credibility adjusted, and to spot potential errors or gaps within the data itself," Frank explained. "It's important to have a benchmark to compare against to ensure we're fixing data in a way that doesn't lead to downstream issues."

Designed by Actuaries, for Actuaries

Accorded's team is composed of actuaries, analysts, and data engineers. As Frank - himself a health actuary - points out, "We wanted to make sure we met our customers where they were." This means Acumen was built with a deep understanding that actuaries "don't want to pick up a new tool or go to a new portal," but instead need solutions that integrate with their established workflows. Hence, the data from Acumen continuously feeds into the customer’s data warehouse - clean and ready to use.

Ready to Transform Your Actuarial Team's Productivity?

If your organization's actuaries and analysts are spending more time managing data than providing strategic insights, Accorded's Acumen platform could be the solution you've been seeking.

Contact Accorded at hello@accorded.com to learn how Acumen can help your actuarial team shift from data wrangling to performing high-impact analytics.

‍