Arab Health 2008

Universal Health Consultants

‘Healthcare Insurance: Improving Internal Efficiencies And Service Delivery’, was presented to the Arab Health Insurance Forum in Dubai, UAE on 27 to 31 January 2008. UHC also presented on ‘Collaboratively Working Between All Stakeholders To Provide Cost Effective Comprehensive Insurance’ and ‘The Role Of Re-insurance In The Growing Middle East Market’ during panel sessions.

Synopsis

The paper focuses on value creation for European and UAE healthcare insurance companies through improving internal efficiencies and service delivery.

The European and UAE dimensions are characterised by the range of relationships between healthcare insurance and public healthcare systems (e.g., substitutive, supplementary and complementary systems that co-exist), risk sharing models and the varying nature of market regulation. The healthcare insurer is considered as essentially a system of risk dynamics that consists of market participants that interact with each other.

Value innovation theory and virtual value chains are discussed in the context of improving internal efficiencies and service delivery. Value innovation theory challenges the view that higher customer value inevitably involves higher costs. Instead, raising customer value comes from eliminating and reducing the factors insurers compete on and creates uncontested new market space by creating valued new factors. It can be characterised as the simultaneous pursuit of product/service differentiation and low cost. For value innovators, practical management tools include virtual value chains, which can be used to re-configure the physical value chain to meet customer value needs in the increasingly digital world of healthcare insurance services. The underlying concept was that every business competes in two worlds, the physical world (where we can see and touch the products and services) and the virtual world (where we have only digital information) and a new marketspace for customers.

The paper will seek to include specific and practical examples illustrating how a UAE healthcare insurer can apply improved internal efficiency and service delivery models.

IAA Health Section Colloquium

13th – 16th May 2007

CTICC

www.iaahs2007.com

To contact us for more information:

E-mail: uhcg@cwgsy.net