The global digital health market is sizable and growing fast.
A recent report from the business intelligence market research firm Grand View Research valued the market at $211 billion in 2022, and projects it will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 18.6% between now and 2030.
COVID-19 turbocharged many of the global digital health trends that were already underway prior to the pandemic. The urgent need to meet fast-rising care needs while maintaining social distancing protocols gave healthcare providers and insurers a strong appreciation of how remote healthcare could fill a needs gap and how integrating providers into an ecosystem could enhance health management.
In the Middle East, digital healthcare has been establishing a firm base. Governments in Dubai, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, have established integrated health information exchange (HIE) platforms, which are connecting clinicians and other healthcare providers and insurers, unifying individual electronic medical and healthcare records, and simplifying filing, assessing, and paying of claims.
Digital health is “the application of information and communications technology to provide accessibility to interventions to prevent disease and improve quality of life.” For insurers, digital health also encompasses managing cost of care.
Digital health encompasses a range of technologies, including mobile health (mHealth) apps, electronic medical records (a patient’s digitalized clinical records), and electronic health records (digitalized records of all health services provided to a patient). They also encompass data from health-focused wearable devices and digital therapeutics, telemedicine and telehealth (which includes non-clinical services) as well as personalized medicine.
All of these inputs ultimately produce structured and unstructured experience data that can provide insurance industry analysts and data scientists with the raw information needed to develop health and cost management solutions to improve patient health and insurer financial outcomes.
Health insurance value chain improvements are generally driven, at least in part, by insurtech initiatives, but they need to integrate with digital health initiatives for better data-driven customer management and health outcomes.
The migration of the health insurance value chain toward an integrated framework is becoming necessary for insurers seeking to remain aligned with digital health.
Digital health solutions in the Middle East are making available experience data on a real time basis right from the point of care. This is likely to have a profound impact on the health insurance industry overall. Focusing on how customers and companies interact, prioritizing the customer experience over profitability and commissions, and accepting that one-size-fits-all products that do not fit current customer expectations and lifestyles, are no longer enough. Business models focused on customer-centricity, flexibility, and transparency will be key future drivers of sustainable growth and success.
The industry needs to move toward real connectivity. At the center of this move, increasingly, must be the internet of medical things.
For individual and SME groups, digitalized direct-to-customer distribution and product marketing via a well-designed and visually attractive customer experience interface may make it easier for insurers to engage directly with their customers in ways that may benefit both insurers and policyholders by improving customer health management, strengthening insurer retention, and stabilizizing portfolios.
The abundant, detailed experience data from wearables, digital therapeutics, and more is enabling actuaries to incorporate psychographic parameters such as personality, hobbies, attitudes, values, and likes and dislikes into their risk modelling analyses, alongside demographic parameters such as age, gender, nationality, and occupation. Such an approach may ensure more accurate customer risk assessment and may also support the development of more personalized products and services.
An insurer’s claims management IT platform that integrates with a provider’s digital health framework for real time claims monitoring through an algorithm-enabled analytic tool can likely decrease overutilization. In addition, a digital payment gateway to enable settlement of eligible claims at the point of service may reduce abuse and waste.
For insurers, collaborating with physicians and service providers will enable the development of business models that can elicit better engagement for all participants as well as enabling stronger data analytics.
Some aims can include:
The focus of any digital transformation strategy by health insurers should be to enable sustainable growth and profitability via:
All of these will not only strengthen products and pricing, they will also help improve population health and reduce the a country’s economic burden from health-related needs.
Digital health is here to stay and will continue to grow. Enabling virtual access to healthcare globally via data-driven care pathways and tools for multiple common illnesses, as well as remote monitoring, treatment, and medication management capabilities, can empower insureds actively to manage and improve their own health and wellness, which can, in turn, improve insurer portfolio financial management and performance. Health insurers would do well to develop digital transformation strategies that can move these goals forward.
Reprinted with permission from the Middle East Insurance Review.
