Modernisation of the health insurance sector

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a widespread crisis across the world, but it has also helped businesses and individuals adapt to changing scenarios, and this includes insurance.

While during the early days there was a lot of panic around the uncertainty, questions about health and life insurance policy would cover the pandemic, the risk reduction for vehicles and what is there were instances of non-payment of insurance premiums. Insurance companies were quick to think on their feet and clarify these queries.  The responses included 1) COVID-19 was not excluded from health and life policies, extensions of the validity on vehicle insurance was available and finally, policy holders were given alternatives to meet their premium payments.

Digitalization of processes requires real-time data access as well as developing agile features in core systems. In order to reach this stage, insurers are working towards overhauling their core systems and transforming the overall business model.   Companies have three paths to choose from – modernizing a legacy IT platform, building a new proprietary platform, or buying a standard software package. We had written about the importance of modernisation of systems in an earlier blog post, and in this post shall talk specifically about the healthcare space. 

Need to Modernise healthcare 

The pressure on insurers to innovate, and introduce new products is at an all time high, considering the competition out there. Speed to market and agility are relatively slow owing to the cumbersome regulatory policies, traditional legacy infrastructure, functional silos, and long drawn processes. With growing customer expectations and digitization, if these challenges are not addressed, it will become difficult to stay ahead of the game.  

The insurance industry has also over the years begun looking at available digital solutions to innovate, develop new products, offer quotes, clear out claims, and above all offer high levels of customer experience. In today’s evolving world, the need to modernize the IT systems has become an essential, considering the growing insurtech companies that have given companies a sneak peek into what opportunities lie ahead.  The IT capabilities will therefore need to be revamped, while ensuring operational costs are contained, while resources are optimised.  

Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/it-modernization-in-insurance-three-paths-to-transformation

Benefits of modernising healthcare

Here are the top three benefits of modernising healthcare solutions, 

Move to the cloud

Quite a few healthcare organizations are already moving to the cloud and integrating it with their existing systems. While the industry has been overall slow to adopt this technology, it is growing. Moving to the cloud implies easy access of data, safe and secure storage of data from across various sources, and customers can also access the same anytime from anywhere. It helps reduce the dependency on the IT resources, while increasing efficiency and reducing overall operational cost. Leveraging cloud storage allows healthcare professionals and insurers to control overheads and other incidental costs incurred in storing and maintaining high volume of data.  It also increases performance of resources as they are able to divert their time to priority actionable items. 

This holds true for billing and processing reports as well. Doing away with complicated manual systems, digital solutions will increase agility, and offer a unified enterprise platform that they can quickly change or modify when a need arises.  

Data & Analytics

For health insurance companies, when it comes to patient data or policyholders sending information from various sources, it becomes essential to be able to  collate the data, and analyse the same before offering them a suitable policy. Companies are looking at working with product configurator tools to compute premium coverage, and offer informed & personalised products. It also helps eliminate paper trail which is error prone and carries a risk of getting misplaced/lost. Data management process became seamless, and with advanced analytics tools gaining insight into the customer’s profile creating a risk profile becomes efficient. 

Re-imagine the Customer Experience

The customers of today are digitally connected and expect high quality service round the clock from all the businesses they are associated with. They wish to be better informed, increasingly empowered and more engaged to make the right healthcare decisions. Customers across generations today demand personalized and instant access to tools and their policy related information,  and real-time access as well. The data therefore needs to be accurate, relevant and updated at all times. 

To elevate efficiency, and improve the member experience, insurers need to look at end-to-end automation and omnichannel connect. Enabling multi-channel enrollment has become a priority for many. This will change the way customers look at claims management, it will improve speed of claims process, instant validation of information provided and include fraud detection as well.

Customers of today are no longer just looking for suitable products, they are in fact signing up for memorable experiences [across products and service]. While there are a few gaps that are yet to be bridged, modernising the systems and automating process is a good place to start. There needs to be a complete shift to a product development framework that enables customer experience driven modernization.

One of the largest private health insurance companies in India was struggling with traditional methods of interacting with customers, which had proved cumbersome and tedious. Through the mobile app they wanted to get with the changing times and offer the following services, 

• Make payments
• Buy new policies
• Submit scanned receipts and process health insurance claims via their smartphone

Neutrinos took a week to create a proof-of-concept for the customer portal and customer-facing app. The app was going to be built on the Neutrinos low code development platform. The highlight of this mobile app was it included data security and user authentication services which had been integrated in the client’s core insurance systems.

While the primary goal was to meet the growing customer expectations, reduce back-office processing costs and stay ahead of the competition, the company initiated the development of customer-centric mobile apps and portals with Neutrinos solutions. 

Benefits

Ultimately the mobile app would allow customers to access their policies with a single tap, obtain policy-related information, manage their policies; submit, process, monitor, upload supporting documents and report claims via their handheld devices [iOS and Android devices] anywhere and any time. 

1. Customers experienced quicker turnaround time in resolving queries
2. They could access information by logging into the app
3. Customers could reach out to an insurer/agent for any clarifications 
4. The app offered real-time updates via the dashboard 
5. Claims management became simple, easy and settlements were made faster. 

Neutrinos offers a range of digital solutions that includes digitization of the legacy paper-based process with a multipurpose application that offers end-to-end lead management lifecycle on one single platform. Talk to us to understand how our digital solutions can help transform your business.