Digital transformation has changed the way health insurance companies interact and connect with their clients. Advances in technology have led to a revolution of both the systems and traditional procedures within the insurance sector. Providing support and efficient assistance is facilitated on a day-to-day basis, as the management of a high volume of sensitive data for which health insurers must ensure confidentiality.

From the early stages of its expansion, Foyer Global Health has positioned itself as a digital insurer offering an improved and seamless journey to clients and partners. We decided to combine new technologies with competent people to ensure the best customer experience and to better serve our clients. To maintain our high level of customer satisfaction, we invested in our dedicated user experience (UX) team in order to apply a simple guiding principle: give priority to the digital for simple and administrative work but relying on the human being in case of emergency or situations with important emotional charge.

Creating an agile work mindset and environment internally is also a priority. Customer habits are changing faster than ever, and in most cases, the challenge is not finding a new technology to solve an issue but understanding the need for a technological solution and quickly adapting the digital processes.

Helping customers make the right decisions

On the one hand, obtaining regular customer feedback through pilot groups, and measuring the activity on the platforms via digital analytics allow us to respond in a more targeted way to our customers’ requests. On the other hand, the strict application of an agile method – SCRUM in this case – with development cycles of two weeks allows us to adjust our developments very quickly.

Improving services also means offering new value-added services to our customers thus helping them make the right decisions for their health at the most appropriate time. It is for this reason that we decided not to build on the traditional IT systems that currently exist in the insurance industry. Instead, we created a whole new environment with cloud technologies that are by design open, easily connected to technological and health partners, available around the clock, scalable, and able to process information in real-time.

The achievement of national and international certifications by leading cloud providers such as AWS facilitates the deployment of healthcare services around the world by ensuring high standards in various areas in compliance with all legislation. Examples include the combination of the international ISO27001 certification associated with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and

Customers can access online services from anywhere in the world

Accountability Act) in the United States and Health Data Hosting (HDH or HDS) in France, certifying compliance with security requirements for the protection of patient health information. But the cloud alone is not enough. The healthcare ecosystem is still a very fragmented environment today. This is even more true at the international and IPMI level. Despite the advent of new technologies, many service providers still rely on mostly manual processes and exchange data with old protocols such as email or regular file uploads. The systematic use of (application programming interfaces) APIs considerably enriches the nature of the content exchanged and accelerates data processing. From the customer’s point of view, this new combination of cloud services and APIs provides more flexibility: they have access to up-to-date dashboards, and reimbursements are processed in a fast and secure manner. Customers can access online services from anywhere in the world, including telemedicine, Second Medical Opinion, and preventive health services without having to reauthenticate to each provider and resend them all the relevant information.

New healthcare technology

By using new technologies, we aim to enhance automation, and thus reduce the complexity and fragmentation of healthcare around the world. We receive data and information in many different formats and in varying quality. The performance of our technologies is being enhanced daily – thanks to improved components among other things. Significant advancements in both artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies are very interesting for our health insurance activity.

AI is now able to perform more complex tasks, such as natural language processing and image recognition, with greater accuracy and speed

AI is now able to perform more complex tasks, such as natural language processing and image recognition, with greater accuracy and speed. OCR technology has also improved, allowing for more accurate and efficient conversion of printed or handwritten text into digital formats. These advancements will lead to increase efficiency and productivity in the IPMI industry. This is however futile if the quality of the input data is poor. Today, 70 per cent of the effort in the data processing flow is still focused on ranking and improving data quality. This step is essential to provide our customers with quality service.

Therefore, we are investing heavily in automation for data cleansing, management, and analysis. This allows us to set the right price for our products but above all to provide the customer with quality data in an area that is important to them: his/her health.

Finally, we cannot afford to compromise the security and confidentiality of the sensitive data we process for our customers. A new European regulation will soon come into force in relation to this topic: digital operational resilience for the financial sector (DORA). It represents an obligation but above all an opportunity for the European health insurance sector to raise its security standards. The document states that each financial company will have to establish a clear ICT risk management framework and that testing requirements, especially penetration testing, will be strengthened. Transparency towards customers and partners will also be improved as information about security incidents will have to be reported, and in some cases, made public. An important part of the regulation concerns the reinforcement of controls when insurance companies use subcontractors – a practice that tends to become more widespread with the advent of the cloud. It is also important to note that through this new legislation the European institutions wish to encourage the sharing of information between financial institutions in the field of information security.

Protecting sensitive information

In this context, the last few years have seen the emergence of Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams in charge of real-time monitoring of the network and remediation of security incidents in insurance companies. They use new technologies to better trace the processing of information, protect it and delete it once it no longer has a purpose in our systems. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) automated processes prevents users from sending sensitive information outside the corporate environment. SIEM tools collect, aggregate, and analyse volumes of data from an organisation’s applications, devices, servers, and users in real-time. These tools use predetermined rules to define threats and generate alerts. In the particular context of FGH, a specific tool has been set up to ensure that personal data are correctly recorded, above all, deleted after the end of the contractual relationship if it is no longer required.

The efficiency of our processes creates a holistic and user-friendly context for our partners and final customers

All these initiatives are undertaken by Foyer Global Health in an open and innovative spirit, which affects the customer experience and the implementation of new services and data. The efficiency of our processes creates a holistic and user-friendly context for our partners and final customers, who can make the right decisions with the right level of information in full confidentiality. We are glad to have the support of Foyer Group with know-how and finance. As part of the values of our companies, it is very important for Foyer to take part of these initiatives and support its business lines in this direction.