Why life insurers need to invest in patient education

I was very excited when I saw the full page advertisement Aviva Life Insurance ran on 18 Dec 2016 in the Times of India , on providing heart care to couples.The IRDA now allows life insurers to also cover medical illnesses , and I think this is a very healthy trend. In the past, health insurance products were primarily provided by health insurance companies. Most of these had a very shortsighted approach because of legacy issues. They were illness insurance product, which reimbursed for the medical care needed in case the customer fell ill. This is why they did not invest in preventive health care.There was no business case for them to do so, because their customers were often not loyal for a sufficiently long duration of time for this investment to pay off.    If they invested in patient education, it was not possible for them to prove that this provided a financial return on investment. They understood that if they educated customers, they could help them to reduce their risk of certain chronic illnesses such as heart disease , by helping them to modify their behaviour and improve their lifestyle . However, if you spent all this money on the customer, and they then decided after three years to go to some other health insurer, you would effectively lose all that money you had invested in educating him !  The problem with patient education programs which are designed for reducing life style risk factors is that there are very long-term investments , and it...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs