[Evidence based risk assessment of coronary heart disease]

Coronary heart disease (CHD) poses a special challenge for risk assessments. Various kinds of diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, concomitant diseases, risk factors and symptoms need to be connected logically in order to assess the risk of each individual applicant. "Reinsurance manuals" are available to risk assessors in life insurance for this purpose. Using these manuals, the risk assessor can calculate the risk loadings for applicants with specific pre-existing conditions, e.g., CHD. Various tasks thus fall to the reinsurer, which must be able to give grounds for the increased risk loadings, provide the manuals with a process-oriented structure and simultaneously support the primary insurer's business objectives via an intelligent risk assessment. Taking CHD as an example, the following article explains how these tasks can be solved with the aid of medical and mathematical approaches, and how the insurability of applicants with CHD can be extended via the re-evaluation of risks.