Numark's focus on provider self-insured organizations and healthplans has spanned nearly three decades, with a systematized approach to studying healthcare costs through modeling chronic and cancer patients since 2004. By adopting methods used by economists, their model of populations, completed in 2009, was awarded a patent in 2014 and served as the foundation for CareMaps, a powerful cost reduction tool. A national trend towards managed care has led premiums to rise due to an unexplained reason, making it challenging to assess whether premium calculations are reasonable or not.