Smart and proactive health insurance companies
Background
The insurance industry has been one of the largest users of data for decades. In particular, health insurance companies whose business model includes a prepaid monthly membership fee. When a health incidence occurs, payments are made to the hospitals, Doctors, rehabilitation clinics and outpatient care. This reactive approach is gradually changing. Health insurance companies now want to predict if and when their clients will fall sick, how often and at what time in the year. Even more importantly, what proactive measures can they take to prevent or minimise health related incidences?
Datasets used
To provide the best service to their customers, insurance companies try to understand the lifestyle, behavioural patterns and activities of their clients. By correlating anonymised, historical personal health records with other external data sources, this is now possible. External data such as relative humidity, temperature, solar radiation and particle mater sensors can detect amount of pollen in the air and provide warning to individuals who are allergic to it. User physical activity and eating habits can provide useful datasets for predicting patients prone to obesity or high blood pressure. Furthermore, flu and other contagious diseases can be mapped around offices, and public meeting places to help individuals take more hygienic precautions.
Advaneo Data Marketplace
Health insurance companies will have access to over a million datasets on population distribution, location of hospitals and healthcare centres and air quality data to alert their customers how best to stay healthy. The Advaneo data marketplace offers:
Dealing with such medical data is very sensitive and requires the highest possible levels of privacy. How can insurance companies get access to such data to create preventive solutions and programs? The Advaneo data marketplace provides a broker service such that no data is stored by third parties. The exchange of datasets only exists between trusted entities.
Individuals with activity apps and wearables can regularly log data on their mobile phones, and wearables. Such datasets are a great source of information which can be anonymised and seamless traded by the data generator to the health insurance companies.
Insurance companies can create closed user groups with other stakeholders who have air quality data, sports and activity apps, so that metadata is visible only to these users in order to initiate possible direct exchange of data. An added feature is that such closed groups can leverage on datasets we have gathered and already processed.
Impact
Health insurance companies have transformed from their traditional role as health bill settlements to proactively using data to predict and suggest preventive measures for their clients to stay healthy. As this trend grows, data privacy and data governance issues cannot be ignored. Using the Advaneo data marketplace helps companies to meet these privacy requirements while offering addon service to their clients to stay healthy.