Health insurance is an interesting space. Consistent double digit growth has seen a number of players enter the market, causing increasing competition. In a competitive market, players generally look for ways to differentiate themselves and innovate. The team at The Indian Economist found Aditya Birla Healths approach to be especially interesting in this context.
Both consumers and health insurers stand to gain if consumers remain healthy. However, most health insurers do nothing more than collect premiums from consumers and promise to help if a consumer falls ill. This is where Aditya Birla Health goes one step further. Focusing on the age old saying Prevention is better than Cure, the company decided to create an entire ecosystem of offerings to help their consumers remain healthy all through, thereby lowering their vulnerability to illnesses.
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Saying this is easier said than done. With busy lifestyles and increasing stress at the workplace, many professionals face a challenge remaining consistently fit. Some manage to put in a day a week at the gym, but the key issue is – how do I truly remain fit each day?
Aditya Birla Health decided to go beyond its role as merely a health insurer to truly help consumers remain fit by providing a set of tools and incentives to help them tackle their fitness issues. There are three primary steps in this ecosystem: (a) Know your health (b) Improve your health and (c) Get Rewarded
Measuring and knowing your health metrics is critical. It helps provide a baseline from where you can begin improvements. It begins with their Activ Health App. It syncs with fitness wearable devices and helps record the data from the wearable device. Next, the company facilitates an online questionnaire that helps consumers understand their health relative to their current age. This allows the user to truly understand where they stand on the health scale, so they know the amount of work needed to become truly healthy. The company facilitates a series of tests that include Cholesterol, Blood Pressure, Glucose, Body Mass Index and more to help users understand their Healthy Heart ScoreTM. After helping users thoroughly understand their baseline health score, the insurer helps users actually improve their health. The insurer introduced the concept of Active DayzTM. An active day is one in which the user manages to do one of three things – he takes 10,000 steps in that day, he runs a recognised marathon/walkathon/cyclothon or he undertakes an exercise session at an affiliated fitness center for a minimum of 30 mins or loses 300 calories in a day. Through a clever use of technology, the Activ Health App keeps track of all of these activities.
Where the ecosystem gets really interesting is when the rewards kick in. Recognizing that financial incentives will push users by giving them an additional benefit, the insurer set up an interesting incentive table. Using the concept of Active DayzTM, the insurer promised to provide HealthReturnsTM. These are financial benefits that users can use to buy medicines, pay for diagnostic tests, pay for the next policy premium or use them to pay for health emergencies irrespective of whether they are covered by the policy. What is interesting is that the amount of HealthReturnsTMyou get is determined by your fitness level. If you touch 13 and above Active Dayz in a month, you can earn back 30% of your annual policy premium in the form of HealthReturnsTM. Users that do not use the app have the alternative of taking a Fitness Assessment test every 6 months, and you get rewards linked to your Healthy Heart ScoreTM.
This rounds out a summary of the entire fitness ecosystem created by Aditya Birla Health. It is an approach in which a company has gone above and beyond what consumers expect from an insurer, and indicated that it truly cares about keeping its users healthy by helping them measure fitness, improve fitness and get rewarded for doing this.
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