Managing Influenza Pandemic Risk

SF Bay Area-based Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has launched the RMS Infectious Disease Model, the first commercially available probabilistic model for assessing the risk of influenza pandemics across multiple countries.

Here’s a link to a February 27, 2007 press release:

“The RMS model allows life/health insurers and corporate risk managers to quantify mortality and morbidity from nearly 2,000 potential pandemic influenza scenarios, taking into account such factors as likelihood of the pandemic occurring, infectiousness and lethality of the pandemic, demographic impact, location of outbreak, pandemic lifecycle, vaccine production, and national countermeasures. The model covers 31 different countries that collectively comprise over 95% of the global life insurance market.” Here’s a description of RMS: “Founded at Stanford University in 1988, RMS is the world’s leading provider of products and services for the quantification and management of catastrophe risks. We grew rapidly in the 1990s, offering technology and services for the management of insurance catastrophe risk associated with natural perils such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and windstorms, as well as products for weather derivatives and enterprise risk management for the P&C insurance industry. Today, RMS is also the leader in risk modeling for man-made disasters associated with acts of terrorism by analyzing the impact of weapons of mass destruction on property and people for many sectors of the insurance industry.”