In countries with socialized medicine, where everyone has access to basic care, innovations
are hard to roll out nationwide as the system as a whole cannot afford it.
In countries with private health insurance, certain treatments such as cancer care are
so expensive that only the privileged with good insurance plans can afford them.
And where politicians actively work to throw millions off of their coverage and insurers
deny service to people with pre-existing conditions, it’s a whole new level of horror.
The insurance business has to change.
But it’s also bound to change.
Let’s see what the future of health insurance will look like.
Artificial intelligence and new technologies such as wearable sensors will change the status
quo and insurance companies will certainly try to implement these into practice.
The spread of electronic medical records and big data analytics will make it possible to
move from reactive care to preventive and personalized care.
Why is it important?
Because health insurance is a risky business.
From the insurers’ side, they can’t get enough information to make fully informed
investments in a person’s future health.
Companies can obtain information on a patient’s gender, age and some basic details about lifestyle,
but if they cannot measure any health parameters, the value of the investment remains questionable.
From the insured’s side, you simply don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare
who chooses to live an unhealthy life.
So how does digital health change this?
First of all, it will motivate you to live a healthy life.
It’s a key problem that today’s insurance market is one-sided.
Companies don’t reward you for staying healthy and most people don’t take care of their
health the way they should.
They simply pay up, and when a symptom arises, they’ll hope their doctors can fix the problem.
But imagine to get reduced premiums if you keep a healthy lifestyle.
An American insurance company, Oscar Health, is testing those waters.
Their patients get Amazon gift cards as rewards for achieving their daily goals as measured
by a FitBit activity tracker.
It’s a small start, but a start nevertheless.
And much more can be done.
Even today, patients can measure sleep quality, physical activity, stress and blood pressure,
and many other parameters at home.
But big data can go so much further than that.
An Iceland based company, DeCode Genetics, says it has collected full DNA sequences of
over 10,000 individuals.
And because people in Iceland are closely related, DeCode says it can now also extrapolate
to accurately guess the DNA makeup of nearly all other 320,000 citizens of the country,
including those who never participated in its studies.
What does it mean?
According to their CEO, they are able to identify everyone from the country who has a deadly
cancer risk.
The only problem, they are unable to yet warn those people because of the ethical rules
of their research.
But it’s inevitable that these amazing data sets about our health and our lifestyle will
change healthcare as we know it.
So is the future all bright and shiny?
Well, not exactly.
It is no question that this immense amount of health data will be utilized by health
insurance companies.
The question is rather how they will do it.
What if companies will only provide patients with insurance if they are allowed to access
all of their data, including data coming from sleep and fitness trackers, the blood pressure
and ECG they store and the gadgets they use to assess their general well-being.
What if companies will leverage on that data to make premiums higher for high-risk patients?
What about predominantly genetic and not lifestyle-related problems?
What if insurers take pre-existing conditions one step further and require genetic tests
to provide a personalized plan?
That’s why regulators must be at the forefront of innovation.
Only they can ensure to avoid the creation of a Dr. Big Brother who watches us, has access
to every detail of our lives and thus impacts our personal decisions.
We must at all costs avoid a scenario where someone would control what we eat, when we
exercise and when we lay down to sleep.
But if I need to share my fitness tracker’s data with my health insurance company to enjoy
the rewards of living a healthy life and to have an equally compensated healthcare system,
I’m happy to do that.
As long as I’m the sole authority over my health data, and I can decide what and who
I choose to share it with, it’s a small price to pay for a cheaper, sustainable, and
ultimately, a more effective health insurance system.