Lately, we’ve been approached by multiple carriers who are looking to implement workers compensation rating in Oracle Insurance Insbridge Enterprise Rating. If you’re familiar with workers compensation, one of the first questions you might ask yourself is – how does anniversary rating work in Oracle Insbridge? I’m going to do my best to answer that question, but first let’s talk about what anniversary rating is exactly.
What is an Anniversary Rating Date?
NCCI (National Council on Compensation Insurance) has an excellent guide available online that explains how an anniversary rating date applies to a workers compensation policy – check it out here. In the guide, NCCI simply states:
The ARD [anniversary rating date] is the date used to determine the rules, classifications, and rates applicable to a policy.
To take it one step further, an anniversary rating date ensures that the policy uses the same rules and rates for a full year, regardless of any rate changes that might have occurred during the life of the policy. When talking about anniversary rating, I almost always have to get on a whiteboard and draw a timeline to visualize what’s going on and luckily NCCI provides a nice example in their guide:
Looking at this timeline you can see that, when a policy is rewritten, two sets of rates are used:
- Starting on July 1, 2014, the policy uses rates effective January 1, 2014.
- Starting on January 1, 2015, the policy uses rates effective January 1, 2015.
We could spend all day talking about anniversary rating dates, but I really want to talk about how you can set this up in Oracle Insbridge. Take a peek at the NCCI guide if you have additional questions regarding anniversary rating dates.
How can I setup Anniversary Rating in Oracle Insbridge?
If you’re a seasoned Oracle Insbridge user, you’re probably already trying to figure out how to make this work with callouts and versioning. Before you go down that path, you might want to consider categories instead.
Categories in Oracle Insbridge are used to define the overall structure of your rating programs for a given line of business. All inputs, outputs, tables, and algorithms are assigned a category. When you assign a table to a category, that table will execute for each instance of that category in the rating request. As an example, if you have a Class Rate table defined at a Class category level, the Class Rate table will retrieve a value for each class on the policy. Setting up your categories in a manner that allows you to reuse variables and algorithms during rating should be the first consideration when designing your rating programs. Category design can be an art form and is critical to a successful implementation.
Using categories, you can simulate the two periods that are represented in the timeline we discussed earlier. Let’s say you create a Split category with a child Class category. With this structure, you can pass in multiple Splits with multiple Classes in each split to calculate the rates/premiums associated with each period on the policy.
One thing to consider with this approach and assuming you’ve decided against adding callouts, tables would need date criteria to assist in the rate selection for each period. Date criteria in tables are usually frowned upon in Oracle Insbridge circles due to how versioning works. Tables can get relatively large over time, but there are ways to manage the data that’s needed for anniversary rating using versioning and revisioning. When considering all options, specifically with callouts, I think you’ll find that managing large tables is the lesser of all evils.
Conclusion
Anniversary rating is a central topic when it comes to workers compensation. I’ve only skimmed the surface here, but hopefully I’ve got you thinking about how you can set it up in Oracle Insbridge with an emphasis on taking advantage of categories.