Skip to main content

Health Insurance and Technology


During ‘Paul's roadshow', San Francisco town hall event in November last year, someone asked a question about possibilities of us acquiring a Healthcare Provider / Hospital Group. Paul shared that running a Healthcare Provider / Hospital Group requires specialized expertise and assets. Acquisitions of these expertise and assets is expensive requiring financial planning. Also integrating newly acquired entity will present organizational challenges. Due to these reasons, in the near term we will not pursue such an acquisition and we have ample opportunities in our current business to grow - organically and through acquisitions of other health plans – and we will focus on that.

It was good to know that our leadership has considered acquiring a Healthcare Provider / Hospital Group, but it was not was something we will pursue in near term due to reasons stated above. 

I left the meeting thinking if these barriers to entry (cost and other organizational challenges) can be overcome using Technology. This thought lingered on and I started to look for technology companies who have may have achieved that. Uber and airbnb were the ones that stood out to me. Uber does not own cars or employ drivers who drive these cars (though that may soon be changing in some geographies), but taps into the sharing economy by providing a platform and process that enables connecting drivers with the riders. Airbnb does the same for rental properties without owning them. 

Can this be applied to Health Insurance?  I decided to look at the basics and see what ‘Health Insurance’ is in order to determine applicability of ‘Uber’ like approach. 

According to the Health Insurance Association of America, health insurance is defined as "coverage that provides for the payments of benefits as a result of sickness or injury.   Wikipedia describes Health Insurance as “insurance against the risk of incurring medical expenses among individuals. By estimating the overall risk of health care and health system expenses, among a targeted group, an insurer can develop a routine finance structure, such as a monthly premium or payroll tax, to ensure that money is available to pay for the health care benefits specified in the insurance agreement. The benefit is administered by a central organization such as a government agency, private business, or not-for-profit entity.”

Reading this made me think that we are already using ‘Uber’ like approach! Like Uber, we provide financial structure, create a process and ‘set terms’ in an agreement / contract and connect ‘patients’ with provider’. This is exciting because, initially I was thinking for copying Uber’s approach and now I am thinking that it’s the other way round . 

One thing that Uber did which we have not so far, is use newer technological capabilities and apply them to a specific pain point. to make these connections happen. 

How do we do as Health Insurance company to use technology to deliver healthcare to patient in a timely manner – here is one idea : Bl-Uber

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to go from ‘thought’ to ‘reality - Be comfortable with your ‘naivety’

Most of the times ideas that you have will fall outside of your comfort area and ‘day job skills’. You may be thinking about ‘transplanting’ what you have learned in one area and trying to apply the same in a different area. After the initial excitement, you will realize that you know very little about the other area in which you are venturing. Instead of fearing such situation, you should be ‘comfortably excited’. Here are 2 reasons why: You will have an opportunity to learn about this new area. Not knowing all details about this new area is an advantage, and not a handicap. This naivety allows you to not be bounded by assumptions that people with thorough knowledge and experience of this area have. This allows you to bring in a new perspective. Take ideas, data, experience and inspiration from your current experience to the new area. For more such lessons,  click here.
Post a Comment
Read more

How to innovate - Skate where the puck is going

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” – Wayne Gretzky This cliché quote from Gretzky has been so overused that people have stopped paying attention to anything that follows it. So why do I bring up this quote in the context of Innovation? I bring it up to highlight that most people using this quote do not talk about difficulty involved in, and practice and patience needed to anticipate where puck is going. So I want to recognize that anticipating where proverbial puck is going is not easy. It requires physical and mental conditioning, developing specific skills and lot of practice. It also requires being comfortable with going to a place where the puck does not arrive. If we want to innovate, we need to get comfortable with not finding the puck where we anticipated it to go. And keep ‘pivoting’ till we become good at reaching as close to puck as we can. Same is the case with Innovation – it is not eas...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are you an Innovator?

'Why I am asking this?'. As someone who 'thinks' he is an innovator, I often find my self alone when I want to share my ideas, discuss solutions, get feedback and get a different perspective. This question is an attempt to seek out others who may also find themselves in similar situation. I would love to form a group of such people to collaborate for our mutual benefit. "When in doubt, ask Wikipedia": This principle has stood me well whenever I find myself short on information about something or when I cannot express something concisely and clearly. Wikipedia has never disappointed me and has often left me in utter dis-belief that it is 'crowd sourced' and not 'institutionally curated' information.     Here is what Wikipedia says about an Innovator:             An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality  something bett...
Post a Comment
Read more