The partnership is intended to solve four major areas of group health insurance — real-time pricing, onboarding, policy management and claims — through the new products.
ICICI Lombard General Insurance announced that it has tied up with Plum, an employee health insurance startup, to co-create technologically backed group health insurance products.
The penetration of health insurance across India is abysmally low, with 0.29 per cent of GDP being spent on the health sector. Not surprisingly, India witnesses one of the highest out-of-pocket expenditures. There is an enormous unmet demand for healthcare, with only 2 per cent of the total healthcare expenditure being currently covered by insurance providers.
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How will this help the corporates?
Real-time pricing
In general, a company might receive a price estimate for a group health insurance policy within five days to a couple of weeks. This happens due to a largely manual process of going through the data set and assessing the risk. But, the new partnership has built automated processes around data cleaning, validation, fraud detection, and underwriting, thereby reducing the time taken to receive price estimates to a few minutes. Companies can now visit www.plumhq.com, answer a few simple questions about their team, and get a price estimate in real-time. From thereon, the company can upload the data on the portal, make the payment, and activate the policy instantly.
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Onboarding
ICICI and Plum claim that employees would be onboarded instantly as soon as the group policy is purchased. Employees would be taken through a digital onboarding process wherein they understand their insurance benefits in simple English (rather than a long legal document).
Policy management
Recruitments happen quite often in a company and most of them hire new people almost daily. ICICI and Plum are providing a real-time endorsement product that will allow organisations to activate the health insurance of employees as soon as they join the company. Employees do not have to wait for weeks to get a health ID card anymore.
Claims
Seamless claims experience enhances the relationship between the insurer and the customers. They are now building an online claims submission tool for employees along with a real-time tracking system.
