FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine 
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute 

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-23/24

Title and Subtitle:Exploring Industry Medical Risk Management Best Practices for Application to Aerospace Medicine

Report Date: July 2023

Authors:R. Lieberthal, I. Catovic, C. Mills, G. Chesterton

Abstract: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Office of Aerospace Medicine tasked MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development to investigate relevant industry best practices applicable to the forecasting and managing pilot medical risks. In particular, the research focused on the insurance industry for risk assessment expertise. MITRE gathered observations from sources including internal MITRE subject matter experts, insurance brokers, insurance companies, technology vendors, and trade associations. The research also applied TRIZ—the theory of inventive problem-solving. TRIZ proposes that narrow problems can be abstracted to broad problems for which broad solutions already exist. MITRE mapped key elements from the insurance industry process model to the elements of FAA’s Safety Risk Management / Safety Assurance process of Order 8040.4B. This juxtaposition yielded a novel finding of the research: a unified process model with common elements. MITRE identified actions that can be adopted from the insurance domain best practices for each step of this unified process model.

Key Words: Aviation, Certification, Insurance, Pilot, Risk Management. Safety Assurance, Systematic Inventive Thinking, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, TRIZ

No. of Pages: 14