Sometimes, a small press release can hide a transformative moment for global healthcare. Ian Youngman analyses the new digital healthcare partnership between AXA and Microsoft and considers what the wider transformation means for the medical travel sector.
The health insurer role has transformed
All health players involved in the patient journey must adjust their services and deliver on the promise of lower cost and more personalised services, according to global health insurer AXA. The company is at the forefront of merging health insurance and healthcare in a strategic, customer-focussed way.
In a recent announcement, it has said it will work with Microsoft to build a digital healthcare platform that simplifies healthcare journeys and empowers customers with access to a fully integrated ecosystem. A pilot programme was successfully launched in late 2020 in Germany and Italy, and will be expanded by 2022 to the UK, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland.
The partnership will be built on AXA’s global reach, experience in healthcare and insurance, business and technology architecture skills, and Microsoft’s expertise in cloud-based computing, artificial intelligence, and array of partnerships with clinical partners and third-party vendors.
The platform will link digital health services offered by AXA to support its customers at every stage of their e-health experience.
The range of services offered will include a self-assessment and prevention tool, a medical concierge, a teleconsultation interface, a digital document vault, home care services (e.g., medicine delivery) and a directory of healthcare professionals.
In the long-term, the platform aims to allow integration of third-party services, with the ambition of creating an open, global service for healthcare providers and patients, regardless of whether or not they are AXA customers.
AXA CEO, Thomas Buberl, explains the deal: “AXA is a world leader in healthcare. Our objectives in this field are among the top priorities of our Driving Progress 2023 strategic plan. In many countries, the fragmentation, complexity and costs of health systems are a barrier to access to care. This new ecosystem of services that we have developed with Microsoft is a powerful lever to provide customers with access to the best healthcare solutions. It also illustrates the decisive role of AXA’s technological expertise in the success of its Payer to Partner strategy.”
Working alongside patients and health professionals, the insurer’s role has been transformed. AXA is building on technological innovation and analyses of the needs of patients, doctors and care givers, supported by increasing volumes of data. The group is positioned as a partner of customers’ health to become a facilitator, advisor and coach.
To better manage healthcare journeys, the group has opened integrated medical centres in Egypt and Mexico, and is aiming to open 50 by 2023 to serve 1.5 million patients in key emerging markets – a new facet of its role as a partner. By offering a bundle of services that are usually provided by different companies, AXA is simplifying access to quality healthcare for customers.
Microsoft Healthcare: the new health tech empire
Microsoft is building a healthcare technology global empire under the banner of Microsoft Healthcare, notably introducing Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, its first vertical cloud offering, in May last year.
In the latest step in its industry-specific cloud strategy, it has recently bought a clinical documentation and artificial intelligence company, Nuance Communications for US$19.7 billion. The deal will double its total addressable market in the healthcare provider space.
Nuance sells products for tasks from clinical speech recognition, radiological reporting, workflow management and clinical decision support. It has clients for speech-to-text and digital assistants in a variety of industries, but has streamlined its portfolio to focus on healthcare, due to growing demand. Nuance’s products are used by more than 55% of physicians and 75% of radiologists in the U.S., and in 77% of U.S. hospitals.
Nuance partners with Microsoft on ambient clinical intelligence, AI software that understands patient-clinician conversations and can automatically integrate that data into the patient’s medical record. It can listen in on a medical visit, transcribe the conversation into text, pull out relevant medical information and auto-populate that data into the EHR, for the physician to review and sign.
Nuance and Microsoft have integrated Nuance DAX, into Microsoft’s video conferencing platform for telehealth visits.
Ping An’s healthcare ecosystem strategy
Beyond the AXA-Microsoft partnership, many big health insurers are becoming healthcare/health insurance providers, and other top tech companies are moving into healthcare.
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China claims that their healthcare ecosystem is one of Ping An Group’s long-term core strategies. With more than 20 years of effort and investment in the healthcare sector, the company has developed into a leading healthcare enterprise in China. Ping An Good Doctor claims to have 373 million registered users as of the end of 2020, while Ping An HealthKonnect provides services for 10,000 administrative units, businesses and public institutions.
The Group aims to establish strong technological competition entry barriers by building a closed loop ecosystem of healthcare services that includes government, patients, medical service providers, social and commercial health insurers and technology.
Ping An targets ‘pan healthcare’, which focuses on the provision of healthcare services through an integrated platform and five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and Smart City services. Its ‘Finance + Technology’ and ‘Finance + Ecosystems’ strategies aim to provide customers and internet users with innovative and simple products and services.
Implications for medical travel
The overall plan by the giant insurers and tech groups is a closed-loop system of healthcare, insurance, finance, technology and other services, creating a global supermarket that will lock out competitor access to millions of customers.
Globally, AXA has 108 million customers, not all on healthcare/health insurance, so just allowing this group access to a global healthcare marketplace is significant.
If, as promised, it is then opened out to anyone, the potential is huge. AXA will however need to charge for access to either provider or consumer, so it can make money on both health insurance and healthcare.
These digital healthcare systems make it easy for customers to find and access medical services in their own country and eventually across the globe. Domestic and international medical tourism will be included. This could take out many smaller national or regional medical concierge/healthcare platforms.
Few, if any, in medical tourism have the money, knowledge, tech or global reach to compete head to head with this transformation. How will the sector evolve to pick up the business that these global healthcare super tankers do not want or cannot access?
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