New Care Models: How insurers can rise to the challenge of older and sicker societies
Health and social care systems globally are under ever more pressure to deliver high-quality and affordable care to increasingly ageing populations. The challenge is further exacerbated by the rising costs of care and epidemiological shifts towards chronic, non-communicable diseases. Life and health insurers are increasingly shouldering related burdens.
New care models (NCMs) seek to tackle these issues by offering an approach to care delivery – focused on prevention, proactive management of chronic disease and collaboration between care disciplines – that both improves consumer experiences and health outcomes and reduces costs. This report explores the current evidence on the effectiveness of NCMs, outlining what insurers need to do to successfully adopt them.
Based on the findings of an extensive literature review and 15 interviews with key informants, the report offers the following three recommendations for insurers:
- Enhance the value proposition of NCMs to go beyond just choice and convenience. Greater thought and investment is required across the industry to develop marketing and distribution channels that can adequately engage consumers in understanding new, dynamic products and relay the positive externalities of NCMs over traditional models of care.
- Become a strategic orchestrator of services. Insurers need to assume the role of a strategic payer. This will involve an understanding not only of how to increase demand but how to ensure favourable conditions that can fulfil the promises made to policyholders.
- Focus on the convergence of life and health insurance. NCMs offer an ideal opportunity for insurers to create a cradle-to-grave joint health-life ecosystem. Pooling, analysing and sharing data in real time and joint marketing and distribution plans are obvious starting points.