Have you ever wondered how remote patient monitoring (RPM) could be used in the insurance sector in Western Africa? Our recent webinar delved into this very question, inviting health insurance providers to learn more about how Clinitouch can improve care delivery, all while lowering costs.

Almost every country is suffering from a tsunami of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and it’s no surprise that these are some of the most expensive health conditions for insurers. Repeat admissions, delays in seeking treatment and a rising number of co-morbidities are just some of the ways costs can stack up.

As explained by Dr Noel O’Kelly, Co-Founder and Medical Director here at Clinitouch, our technology is designed to help manage those patients more efficiently. Clinitouch does this by connecting patients with their clinical team, no matter the location. Using questionnaires and vital sign readings, clinicians proactively manage their patients using the platform’s red, amber or green triage system. This means it’s easier to spot signs of concern before the patient worsens, reducing unnecessary - and costly – clinic or hospital admissions. It’s this earlier intervention that could lead to significant cost savings for insurers.

We also shared some example cost savings as modelled by our health economists, demonstrating how maximising efficiencies and reducing unnecessary healthcare utilisations can add up to significant savings. Take hypertension as an example, for a newly diagnosed patient in Ghana, managing their hypertension with face-to-face consultations could rack up costs of over $190 per year. However, with RPM, you could see this drop to just $76.32. Now imagine this across even just 100 patients and as an insurance company, you could see over $11,000 in gross savings.

Whilst this may be a fairly new concept in the insurance sector in Ghana and Nigeria, Bruce Adams, our commercial director, shared some early signs of success from our live project with a medical aid scheme in Johannesburg. Lowering the costs of hospital referrals from $175k to $1.8k is just one of the early indicators that this project is helping to save health insurers money.

Our panelists have shared their comments on the challenges and opportunity for remote patient monitoring to help insurance companies better manage their patients with NCDs below. Or, if you’d like to watch the full recording or download the slides from the webinar, you can do that here.

Five key takeaways from the webinar

1. Patients can be skeptical about health insurance, but awareness is crucial in improving the uptake in Western Africa

“There is limited awareness. People don't know that they actually have access to some of these insurance packages that can help them with cost of care overall… The key to all of this remains public awareness and education.”
John Adesioye, CEO, Utopian Consulting

2. Remote patent monitoring can help to reduce costs for insurers through proactive management of patients, lowering the number of complications and therefore claims (find out how much you could save here)

“If you can monitor some patients that already have chronic diseases, their chances of getting advanced complications and incidences from those diseases are reduced. These are ways that it can actually benefit the insurance companies overall, from a cost reduction in the care delivery.”
John Adesioye, CEO, Utopian Consulting

“If you look at the projects that we've rolled out already in the private insurance space, the returns have been quite quick because we've worked with our health economist teams and the claims managers at the insurance firms to identify the patients where we'll get that return on investment quite swiftly, so that it pays for itself. And then we can scale up.”
Bruce Adams, Commercial Director, Clinitouch

3. Rising healthcare costs put pressure on insurance companies, which can make it difficult to focus on improving the quality of their service offerings, but remote patient monitoring could help to tackle this challenge

“A lot of insurance companies are in it to actually make some money, but when you have to spend a lot of what the premiums you're actually charging on cost of care, because this continues to rise, it becomes a challenge for some of these HMOs.”
John Adesioye, CEO, Utopian Consulting

“Once health insurance providers can demonstrate that through the use of Clinitouch, they can reduce costs, that in itself will allow them to be a lot more cost effective and efficient and their bottom line would increase. That means that they will have a lot more room to offer a higher service to their client base, and then by doing so, they increase their competitive advantage.”
Godlove Otoo, Investment Advisor for Ghana, UK Dept for Business & Trade

4. Improved healthcare coverage can drive customer loyalty, and in turn, increase your competitive advantage as an insurance provider

“Customer loyalty is very key. And in a market like this, the relationship is almost everything, and so the more you can build a relationship with your stakeholders and your clients along that value chain, the better you are able to keep them and the edge you get.”
Godlove Otoo, Investment Advisor for Ghana, UK Dept for Business & Trade

5. You need to understand how to engage your patients and clinicians to adopt and utilise remote patient monitoring technology

“One of the biggest ways of advertisement around here is word of mouth. When a patient or a client can tell somebody else, “my insurance company is different. I don't have to go into the clinic 12 times a year because a lot of what I do is through my Clinitouch app, so I don't have to go in as frequently. The next question is, “Who's your insurance company?””
John Adesioye, CEO, Utopian Consulting

Want to read more about why remote patient monitoring makes business sense for insurers? Read our article where industry experts give their take on how RPM can revolutionise healthcare in Africa and seamlessly integrate into insurers' offerings. Read the full article here.