Navi’s mission is to leverage the intersection of finance and technology to offer customers financial services that are simple, affordable, and accessible. In keeping with this mission, we have taken great strides to bring you a health insurance platform that embodies everything that Navi as a brand is known for — reliability, innovation, first-principle thinking, and a customer-oriented mindset to technology.
Our digital lending app was built with a tech-first approach to redesign the loan approval process making it paperless and instantaneous. We have designed our health insurance platform on the same tenets, making health insurance accessible and customer friendly by digitizing the entire process from purchase and renewals to claims, approvals, and dispersal.
Here’s an insight into the process and technology behind India’s first and fastest digital health insurance product sans agents or third-party partners.
The Groundbreaking Navi Health App
The health insurance penetration in India was only 3 percent in March 2020. The rise in Covid cases fuelled a surge for health insurance policies making health insurance a priority for many. Navi saw a huge want for affordable health insurance and wanted to simplify the process so that a larger populace could easily access quality healthcare.
Our biggest hypothesis was to design a ‘Direct to Consumer’ health insurance retail product available on an online app, completely removing insurance agents and third-party websites from the equation. Consumers can go directly to our Navi Health App, and via an intuitive interface, select a health insurance plan that suits them the best in a quick and completely paperless process.
Navi — Making Insurance Affordable
The high annual premium payments for insurance drive away a considerably large percentage of the population from buying health insurance. We wanted to make health insurance affordable to all and introduced unconventional EMI-based payments for the premium. The flexibility of an EMI-based payment plan allows consumers to opt for a policy with higher coverage without paying a hefty premium in one go.
“ Navi’s mission of applying technology to ease the customer journey through affordable, accessible, and fast financial services has enabled us to redefine health insurance in India with the use of ML and AI technologies to accelerate claims approval and dispersing the claim amount in seconds.”
Introducing ML for Faster Claim Dispersals
In our pre-market phase, we evaluated the platform by experimenting with the user interface (UI) to increase conversions; and with the system design to keep it low cost and easy to build so that our customer acquisition costs reduce.
But the true test of mettle for a health insurance product is when a customer initiates a claim because that is why they buy a policy, to begin with; availability of funds for a medical expense, most often in emergencies.
Traditionally it takes a minimum of 30 minutes to many hours and sometimes even many days to disperse a cashless claim, at times longer. That is a situation usually fraught with stress and talking to agents to get the paperwork together.
Our goal was to eliminate the policy holder’s dependency on human intervention through a fully automated claim approval process which can be done online through the Navi Health App, with the claim then dispersed in seconds. Health insurance is about trust and reliability which is why consumers generally prefer buying insurance through a trusted agent. This contradicts our goal of digitizing the process, but because of automation we accelerated the claims approval process, and have a Claim Settlement Ratio of 97%.
We have achieved this groundbreaking feat through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models to verify insurance claims. But in the absence of Healthcare Guidelines in India and non-standard terminology across hospitals and doctors, codifying the rules is crucial to building a foolproof ML model.
We have anticipated the chances of false claims getting approved initially, but are confident that we will successfully mitigate those over time and enhance the customer experience on Navi’s Health App.
Conclusion
Navi, as a company, is continuously innovating with a customer-first approach, and our focus in building any product is the ultimate customer experience. Our mission for the health insurance product is to give consumers the world’s best claims experience and benefits, so they never have to worry about their health and medical bills.
This mission statement drives us to achieve our vision of becoming India’s best customer-oriented health insurance company, providing affordable and accessible insurance and a streamlined no-fuss claims experience.
