The Indian healthcare system is getting increasingly sick and there is an increasing trust deficit between patients and doctors. Sadly, users don’t trust Health Insurers either, because they are seen as uncaring impersonal corporate behemoths, who care more about their bottom line, rather than improving their user’s health ! Even worse, most users feel that insurers take delight in rejecting claims, and this creates a bad user experience.
The secret sauce to making the insurance model work, is to put the patient at the center of the healthcare universe. You can do this by prescribing Information Therapy ! Information Therapy helps patients get the right medical care by:
Promoting SelfCare and helping them to do as much for themselves as they can
Helping them with Evidence-Based Guidelines , so that they can ask for the right medical treatment that they need – no more and no less
Helping them with Veto Power, so they can say No to medical care they don’t need, thus preventing overtesting and unnecessary surgery .
You could be the first point of contact for patients, as you could be seen as their trusted objective guide. A direct consequence of this initiative would be that doctors and hospitals would be more sensitive and respectful of patients, and the practice of medicine will be strictly evidence-based.
Your platform could address all aspects of health care – preventative, elective and emergency , and could also perhaps include inputs from alternate fields of medicine. Patients will no longer need to rely on Dr. Google , because your website would be seen to be a trusted source of information. This would need to be objective and authentic information that is updated and easy to understand, and would be translated and localised into the major Indian languages over time.
Though foreign insurers do this routinely, no one in India does this as yet. This will allow you to increase your market-share; and be seen to be user-friendly as well – a valuable USP in these competitive times. You could also use this as a source of customer acquisition !
The platform could catalyse an entire ecosystem , because healthcare startups could create clever tools around it. For example, they could build tools to allow patients to choose doctors according to their location ( by using Google maps); or compare hospital bills. Patients could create communities , where they could help other patients with a similar illness. Health insurers, hospitals and doctors could use content from the website , or link to this content, to make sure that their patients are well informed.