Human Health Index

Insurance is one of the most vital and relevant industry on which almost everybody rely on be it Corporations, Individuals or the Government. To begin with- What is Insurance? Following is the definition provided by Wikipedia –

“Insurance is the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another in exchange for money. It is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. An insurer, or insurance carrier, is selling the insurance; the insured, or policyholder, is the person or entity buying the insurance policy. The amount of money to be charged for a certain amount of insurance coverage is called the premium. Risk management, the practice of appraising and controlling risk, has evolved as a discrete field of study and practice.”

The Global Insurance sector rose by 2.7% to approximately USD 4 trillion and this is a reflection of how big the sector is and how many people are involved in it. More the people and with increasing digitalization happening around this directly translates to two things which are common buzzwords among the Technology folks:

·       Big Data

·       Internet of Things

With the sector being completely data driven the technology was bound to play a crucial role in managing many aspects. There are many types of insurances like Property insurance, Health insurance, Auto insurance to name few.

Technology has caught up to simplify the process and corporations are realizing its potential to provide a seamless experience to their clients, as well as the Insurance companies itself. Let’s take instance of Auto insurance .Currently there are many companies who have embraced real-time analytics which is solving multiple problems. Some of the examples are Snapshot by Progressive, Drivewise by Allstate, TrueLane by Hartford and Ingenie's 'Black-box'. The analytics is assisting the companies in fraud detection, expedite the claims and also more importantly they are tracking the real time information from the vehicles to monitor the driving patterns which help them to decide a premium for their service.

On the similar lines, the health industry too can leverage the real time analytics and Internet of Things to a great extent. The service it provides needs to be more organized for a better consumer experience which can go a long way in segregating the genuine clients from the shady ones. The use cases are plenty. One of the trickiest issues which Insurance companies typically end up is in deciding to “calculate the premium” based on the individual’s profile. There is no proven methodology to arrive at it and most of them are ridden with loopholes due to which they end up with huge losses.

 A similar industry operates on a similar model - Banks managing the Credit cards or Loans. How do they decide if they can safely approve the Credit card or Loans? They choose a very interesting approach to deal with it. The person’s history now comes to the picture based on which the Banks obtain a model, which is popularly known as the Credit History.

CIBIL is the organization who is leading in this space in India, which is being leveraged by multiple banks and other money lenders. According to their website this is how they arrive at a Credit approval decision:

“CIBIL collects and maintains records of an individual‘s payments pertaining to loans and credit cards. These records are submitted to CIBIL by banks and other lenders, on a monthly basis. This information is then used to create Credit Information Reports (CIR) and credit scores which are provided to lenders in order to help evaluate and approve loan applications.”

Now coming back to the Health industry, which is based on the same model for data analysis, what is stopping them from not taking a similar approach? The Answer happens to be Data. Thankfully, there are plethora of ways in how we can get a person’s information. With the advent of activity trackers and wireless-enabled wearable technology there has been a rapid rise in the number of products in the market. Some of the popular ones currently are Fitbit, Apple Watch, Gear S, GoPro, Garmin etc.

Let’s take instance of Fitbit. It’s wearable technology products offers range of features and tracks an individual’s activities like food, physical activities and sleep. Since this is the era of Internet of Everything, these information can be broadcasted to various interested parties. Freescale is one such company whose telehealth systems is being used to deliver healthcare solutions to monitor health based on the continuous stream of information. Freescale is betting on the IoT driven devices to pave the way for the future whose implications are bound to impact all the applications across the industries. Here is the illustration from Freescale on the integration of IoT devices with respect to monitoring a person’s health.       

Apple, one of the leaders in Technology industry is heading towards the health and fitness industry which is an indicator of where the next big thing is. The Healthkit software in iOS8 is integrated with Apple watch. They continuously monitor the sleep cycles, stress level, the diet and blood pressure with the help of their powerful sensors.

In conclusion, the IoT concept in the field of healthcare is very promising than in any industry and is definitely going to take the patient monitoring, healthcare services to a higher level and further create transparency on how the industry works and delivers the service and consumer satisfaction.