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Digital Health 2.0 for Insurers -the IT Challenge
Digital health is here to stay – if that wasn’t already obvious at the beginning of 2020, COVID 19 has made us all painfully aware of this. Most health insurers have already invested substantially in a variety of digital health technologies over the last 10 years and are now aggressively adding to and improving their digital offerings. And Life Insurers also recognize that “It is imperative that you have a customer engagement strategy, and that engagement will be based on your customer’s health – you are now in the health business.” Digital health has largely evolved organically – I’ll call this digital health 1.0. Insurers reacted to customer needs by developing or partnering with vendors to deliver a variety of technologies and apps to their members with the goal of providing more cost-efficient operations such as the diagnosis and treatment of many types of illnesses. During COVID the demand for telehealth has skyrocketed, leaving no doubt that digital is more than important – it is now considered essential. 1Why One Expert Says Digital Health and Wellness Services Are Here to Stay, Forbes, August 2020 2Tim Wallace, former CEO of iPipeline to the audience of 600 Life Insurance attendees at Connections,
2019 3The US national telehealth claims tracker reported over a 4,000% increase in June 2020 compared to June
2019. Source: https://www.fairhealth.org/states-by-the-numbers/telehealth
However, in the digital health 1.0 world most insurers are now facing the consequences of that organic process – e.g. having too many apps, tools and platforms that are not integrated. In recent discussions with health plan executives I’ve heard the same story over and over: we need a single platform that contains all the data from all of our digital offerings to: a) understand the health of the individual; b) automate the distribution of the digital health tools to the people that need them; and c) allow us to determine what is working best, and where we need improvements. In other words, digital health needs structural change.