As we can see technology has entered into our lives with various wearable focused devices on fitness, well being, and sport. Fit bit initially started it by counting the number of steps, which has now gone deeper with monitoring of heart-rate, weight, calories, and other complex data like diabetes, hypertension, menstrual cycles, etc. As per the Gartner reports, in the coming years, Digital health with Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Data Analytics According to Gartner, IoT, AI, Data Analytics, are likely to have a greater impact on the insurance sector, with a market penetration of up to 20%. This year the IoT market can grow by 33%, by connecting 20.4 billion devices across the world. Digitization in the health insurance sector will grow further from the use of health insurance premium calculator, digitized claim process, and intimation.
Needless to say, there is an immense scope of digitization in the insurance sector. It brings a high potential for customer engagement and building customer loyalty by offering them something more than the run-of-the-mill health insurance services. let’s see how:
- Real-time Health Information
Nowadays, wearable gadgets and smartphones have become the most indispensable hardware devices and are becoming more and efficient day by day. The smart watches have now been improvising to monitor your heart rate, and can even take an ECG in addition to weight gain, calories burnt, and the number of steps like 5,000 or 10,000, etc. This digital health feature is useful not only for everyday users but for health care professionals, TPA, and the insurers as well.
Let’s understand this with a simple example if a patient is wearing a wearable device that constantly monitors and transmits his health data. If the data is triggering the doctors can take pro-active measures. And the insurer will know that it was not a false claim. Real-time data monitoring can avoid unfortunate situations and helps insurers, doctors, and the insured be on the same page.
- Automate Administrative Tasks
The administration cost in the healthcare and insurance industry accounts for a major portion of the total expenditure. Another alarming stats is that the time given to patients is lesser than the time consumed by the administrative tasks by both the medical practitioners and the insurance department.
With digitization and electronic health records system, the entire healthcare and insurance sector will see a smooth execution and less time-consumption with automated task management. With advanced AI-enabled systems the insurers, doctors, and patients can refer to previous prescription advice and set reminders for future reference. This will smoothen up the entire hospital admission, claim, discharge, and follow-up process. The insured person or his family members will not need to run from pillar to post to file a claim or to settle the claim. The entire focus will be on adequate treatment.
- Communication Channel Between Doctors/Patients/Insurers
A lot of patients suffer from medical conditions that require them to seek medical consultation from different specialists. The need of the hour is to connect the patients to doctors at the time of need to establish a constant stream of communication and help doctors design the best medical plan for the patient. Information sharing will keep the doctors in the loop as to what is working for patients and what is not. And where the progress can be made.
And if the patient gets admitted to a network or non-network hospital the insurer will know the treatment that was advised and will release the claim cost without much paperwork involved. It is not that there is no digitization at all, but some advancement here can assist insurance providers as well as doctors in doing their jobs efficiently and effectively.
- Data Security
There is always some risk of malicious attacks on the digital data, but physical files are also not completely untouchable. The probability of losing data to unforeseen events like negligence, natural disasters, man-made errors is always there. But a properly managed digital health and insurance data will take these risk factors out of the equation. It will make data accessible from anywhere around the world by authorized personnel, in case an emergency strikes it will ensure timely availability of healthcare and insurance. By taking adequate fail-safe measures the date will be secured from any negligence, natural disasters and so on.
What you can do to imbibe digital transformation in your system?
- It is important to start with your customers. So, digitize your end-to-end customer journey’s
- Another key step is to break the functional silos and work towards a cross-functional tool
- Each team can have quantitative targets
- Digitally savvy talent retainment and infusion
- Significantly allocate budget and investment towards digital transformation
- Boost your legacy with digital infrastructure
As per the insurance providers and healthcare providers who are embracing digitization can outperform their competitors. And the trend is continuing to grow!
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