Verily launches health insurance venture for employers

Backed by Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Coefficient plans to offer stop-loss insurance to employers, helping them decrease healthcare costs and manage expenses. The company claims that employers will better understand the risk they’re taking on thanks to Coefficient’s ‘analytics-based underwriting engine’. In addition, the new insurance company will leverage Verily’s hardware, software and data science capabilities, integrating the suite of health devices and tech solutions into its offering for employers and their workforce.

“Employers have been facing rising and increasingly unpredictable healthcare costs for years,” Andy Conrad, CEO of Verily, said in a statement. “Coefficient is aimed at reducing blind spots and providing greater cost control mechanisms for self-funded employers, and we expect that partnering with Swiss Re Corporate Solutions will help us to better develop and distribute our precision risk solution to the employer stop-loss market. Over time, we look forward to integrating Coefficient with Verily’s employer health solutions, including mobile health devices and innovative care management programmes, in order to align payment models with better health outcomes.”

Commenting on the launch, Andreas Berger, CEO of Swiss Re, added: “Swiss Re Corporate Solutions has long prided itself for being a knowledge-based and data-driven insurer. Today, we’re building on that strong foundation by partnering with Alphabet’s Verily to use advanced technology and data analytics to innovate risk management in the employer stop-loss space. We look forward to working with Coefficient in delivering on our mission to address industry inefficiencies, provide an outstanding customer experience and advance corporate insurance together.”

This latest development follows a string of other colossal corporations extending their reach into the health insurance sphere (most recently Walmart). It’s always good to churn things up to stimulate a wealth of new products and services, especially into a system as entrenched in expense as the US healthcare system. The market has been crying out for more cost-saving solutions for some time, and Verily’s new foray will certainly shake things up.