Last Updated 28 Aug 2023
Disclaimers & Disclosures
Here you can find our disclaimers and disclosures. Please make sure you read and understand them.
Disclaimer & Purpose of Waterlily's Projections for Financial and Insurance Professionals:
The Waterlily report has been meticulously designed as a dynamic tool tailored for financial advisors, insurance agents, and stakeholders vested in crafting informed long-term care strategies for their clients. Built on the foundation of rigorous modeling and exhaustive datasets, it provides a lens into the possible trajectories of long-term care, leveraging the wealth of historical data and current trends.
For professionals in the finance and insurance sectors, it's essential to keep these points at the forefront:
Purpose & Nature of Predictions: Waterlily’s projections operate on probabilistic grounds, offering a statistical analysis of potential trajectories based on historical data. While it aids in drawing insights, it is not prescriptive and shouldn't be taken as a concrete roadmap for the future.
An Aid, Not a Substitute: Waterlily serves to bolster the depth of insights that you, as financial or insurance professionals, bring to the table. It’s intended to supplement, not supplant, the specialized knowledge and acumen you and medical professionals offer. Leveraging Waterlily should always be in conjunction with comprehensive consultations with relevant experts in long-term care or financial planning.
Ever-changing Healthcare Landscape: The intricate tapestry of the healthcare and long-term care sectors constantly evolves, shaped by medical innovations, policy overhauls, socio-economic dynamics, and more. While Waterlily is committed to delivering informed and timely insights, the ever-shifting nature of these sectors means there might be unforeseen future developments.
By leveraging the insights from this report in your advisory role, you recognize its purpose: a tool aimed at enriching understanding and assisting in well-informed decision-making processes, always in tandem with specialized professional guidance.
For Long-Term Care Financial Planning Engagements:
When employing the Waterlily tool to develop a long-term care strategy for your client, please be informed that the projections generated are contingent on the precision of data and the assumptions you incorporate. This includes, but isn’t restricted to, client health records, anticipated lifestyle shifts, family medical histories, client's care preferences, and other pertinent parameters. The efficacy and accuracy of Waterlily’s predictions are intertwined with the veracity of your data and the sensibility of your assumptions.
It's paramount to comprehend the following nuances:
Data Integrity Impact: Discrepancies in data or implausible assumptions can significantly skew Waterlily’s projections. For any data incorporated that's maintained by our platform or an affiliate, its value is sourced from the record of origin and represents a snapshot in time. Such data might diverge from official medical or personal logs, underscoring that our tool isn't a replacement for professional medical or financial counsel.
Dependence on Externally Provided Data: For data outside our immediate purview or that of our affiliates, any health or personal specifics used with Waterlily are furnished by you or your client’s authorized representative(s). This data is anchored to the date of submission. We lean heavily on your discernment concerning this data, refraining from any validation or updating endeavors.
Demonstrative Projections: Embedded within your strategic report are scenarios illustrating potential care need trajectories over time, underpinned by variables like health shifts, lifestyle evolutions, and medical advancements. These projections are hypothetical and aim to elucidate potential scenarios without assuring definitive future care requirements or financial outcomes.
It's pivotal to reiterate that while Waterlily is engineered to dispense insights rooted in AI projections, every care decision harbors unique implications. Our tool stands as an adjunct, not a stand-in, for adept financial or medical guidance. Engaging with specialized professionals is indispensable in orchestrating long-term care plans.
While we offer this robust analytical tool, we don’t extend legal, medical, or tax counsel. Collaborate with the appropriate advisors or specialists to address the specific intricacies of your client’s situation.
Waterlily Tool Assumptions & Methodology
As you integrate the Waterlily tool into your client’s financial planning strategy, it's crucial to grasp the foundational methodologies powering its predictions. The tool's precision and reliability are anchored in a combination of statistical approaches.
A Primer on the Statistical Techniques Employed:
Waterlily hinges on two cardinal statistical techniques: regression and classification.
Regression Models:
Used predominantly in scenarios requiring quantifiable forecasts, regression models within Waterlily primarily target projecting specific metrics such as potential spans of long-term care (LTC) needs. Delving deeper:
Objective: Predict a specific value based on input data.
Working Principle: Regression models analyze the historical relationship between known outcomes and the factors influencing them. By understanding this relationship, the model can make predictions for new, unseen data.
Evaluation Metric - Mean Squared Error (MSE): MSE calculates the average squared difference between the actual observed values and the values the model predicts. A smaller MSE value indicates the model's predictions are close to the actual values.
Classification Models:
These models thrive on segregating data into distinct categories. Within the Waterlily context, they illuminate the probability of a client necessitating a particular form of LTC.
Objective: Categorize or classify data based on observed features.
Working Principle: Classification models recognize patterns from historical data where the categories are known. This pattern recognition enables the model to classify new data into one of these predetermined categories.
Evaluation Metric - Accuracy: Accuracy measures the percentage of predictions the model gets right out of all predictions made.
When incorporating the Waterlily tool into your client's financial planning framework, understanding these foundational statistical techniques will enhance the precision and relevance of the long-term care strategies you devise.
Data Sources & Confidence Metrics:
Data Sources:
CMS Datasets:The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) offer datasets that detail a variety of healthcare metrics, including patient demographics, healthcare service usage, cost factors, and outcomes. By incorporating this data, Waterlily gains a robust, reliable, and comprehensive view of long-term care patterns, utilization, and associated variables.
Proprietary Database: Waterlily's proprietary database, with approximately 0.5 billion data points, provides an unparalleled depth and breadth of information on individuals. This data allows for a diverse understanding across various demographic parameters like age, geography, health conditions, and more. The granularity ensures that the insights derived are well-rounded and not skewed towards any specific population subset.
As you integrate these insights into your client's financial and insurance strategies, it's pivotal to understand that the underpinning data sources are comprehensive and trusted, ensuring a sound foundation for your advisory.
Model Training & Testing for Use in Planning:
For the models to generate accurate insights, they undergo two primary phases:
Training: This is where the models "learn" from historical data. They understand relationships, patterns, and correlations between different variables and the outcomes.
Testing: Once trained, the models are tested on unseen data to verify their predictions' accuracy. This phase ensures that the models don't just memorize the training data but can generalize their insights to new data.
Confidence Metrics:
Mean Squared Error (MSE) for Regression Models: MSE is a crucial metric that quantifies how well the model's predictions align with actual observed values. It averages the squared differences between predicted and observed values. A lower MSE indicates that the model's predictions are closer to real-world data, and thus, the model is more reliable.
Accuracy for Classification Models:
Accuracy is a straightforward metric that calculates the proportion of correct predictions out of the total predictions made. A higher accuracy percentage indicates the model's capability to classify data correctly.
Confidence:
Confidence is a synthesis of the models' performance metrics. For regression models, a lower MSE contributes to higher confidence in the predictions. For classification models, higher accuracy leads to greater confidence. It's essential to understand that while these metrics guide the level of trust in the models' outputs, no model can guarantee 100% precision due to the inherent unpredictability and variability in real-world data.
In a formal context, confidence conveys the level of reliability and robustness of Waterlily's insights, with the acknowledgment that while the tool employs state-of-the-art methodologies and extensive datasets, the nature of predictions remains probabilistic.
For financial and insurance professionals using Waterlily, it's essential to use these insights as a starting point. Always consider other factors and consult additional sources when preparing a plan or report for clients.
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
The insights provided by Waterlily on long-term care trajectories are based on hypothetical scenarios. They do not guarantee any actual future outcomes. While the tool offers a basis for understanding potential long-term care paths, it's imperative to approach them as educated estimates rather than definitive forecasts. As professionals devising plans or reports for clients, always ensure a comprehensive approach, integrating external expertise and considering broader variables for a well-rounded long-term care strategy.
Scope and Limitations of Waterlily:
Target Demographic: When incorporating Waterlily's insights into your financial and insurance plans or reports, it's essential to note that the tool is optimized for individuals aged 40 and above. The focus on this demographic stems from its statistical relevance to long-term care patterns. For individuals outside this age range, the tool's predictions might require additional context or verification.
Focus on Physical Care Needs - Activities of Daily Living (ADLs): Waterlily is designed to gauge potential needs related to core self-care tasks, such as bathing, dressing, and other ADLs. Recognize that while the tool can predict a requirement for assistance with 2 or more ADLs — a threshold indicative of potential professional care needs — it doesn't specify which ADLs might be affected. This general approach offers a broader perspective but may warrant more detailed assessments when tailoring plans for specific clients.
Exclusion of Memory Care Insights: While Waterlily provides valuable data regarding physical care needs, it currently does not account for cognitive impairments, like Alzheimer's disease. For clients or scenarios where cognitive decline is a concern, it's advised to incorporate additional expertise or tools that specialize in this area.
Nature of Projections: Waterlily's predictions are the result of extensive modeling and data analysis. However, it's essential to approach them as probabilistic estimates. Several external factors can influence actual long-term care trajectories, such as:
Advances in medical science and healthcare practices.
Changes in a client’s lifestyle or health behaviors after the prediction is made.
Unexpected life events or accidents.
Broader socio-economic and environmental factors.
Incorporating Waterlily's insights into your planning process should serve as a valuable tool to inform potential care trajectories, but always consider it alongside other relevant data and expertise to ensure comprehensive client planning.