A research protocol for the timely recognition of prevention evidence in insurance
Act on prevention before claims arrive, with evidence you can stand behind.
Prevention programmes produce meaningful signals long before claims experience matures. The DSI protocol gives insurers and reinsurers a documented route from those signals to a pricing, reserving or reinsurance decision, with each judgement kept by its owner.
Read the protocol →See a worked example →
Evidence earns recognition. Recognition grows with the evidence.
An avoided claim is never observed
Insurance has mature methods for claims that have occurred but are not yet fully visible. Prevention raises a different question. The claim that matters is the one that did not happen, and what would have happened without the programme can be estimated but never seen.
The avoided claim exists only as a contrast between groups, measured under a study design. A pricing or reserving decision needs something else: an expectation of future claims on future exposure.
Incurred but not reported
Avoided claim
Next year’s expected claims
Prevention evidence enters insurance as a revised expectation of future claims: a contrast measured between groups becomes an assumption about future exposure, through a documented decision.
A programme incurs costs today, shows behavioural and clinical signals within months, and affects mature claims experience only years later. Pricing, reinsurance and contracting decisions are taken in the interval.
Three responses are common, and each leaves something out:
Projected savings taken into the basis
Fast, and liable to overstate uncertain value.
An undocumented judgement margin
Workable, and hard to review or repeat.
Waiting for credible experience
Prudent, and years late.
The protocol offers a fourth route: recognise what the evidence supports now, for a declared decision and a defined period, and revisit it as experience arrives.
Six steps, each with an owner
The decision defines the evidence it needs; the evidence then limits what the decision may assume.
- Define the decision. The decision owner states the decision, the assumption that may change, the population, the horizon and the maximum adjustment.
- Agree the analysis plan. The evaluator and decision owner fix the comparison, diagnostics, fallback and residual bias assessment before the evaluation result is known.
- Review the evidence. The evaluator establishes whether the comparison is valid and what effect it supports.
- Assess the claims impact. The actuary carries the supported effect to expected claims, step by step, with sources and scenarios.
- Set the use limits. The decision owner records what the evidence may change, for which decision, and until when.
- Monitor experience. Named indicators maintain, increase, reduce or withdraw the recognition as experience matures.
The protocol makes each hand-off explicit. The decision, and every professional judgement within it, stays with the receiving institution.
Cases scale with what is at stake: a one-page light record for decisions below an institution’s materiality threshold, seven linked records for material assumptions, and an added independent technical review for reinsurance terms and capital.
DSI ASBL is a Luxembourg non-profit research initiative. The protocol is ready for shadow use and not yet evidenced for embedded reliance in a live programme.
Next: an adversarial stop-case under the frozen rules, independent expert review, and a shadow assessment on a real programme. The work will be presented at the International Congress of Actuaries, Tokyo 2026.