Revolutionising the Digital Healthcare Industry - Interview with Peter Ohnemus, President & CEO at dacadoo

In this interview, Peter Ohnemus reveals how dacadoo has been able to leverage technology to empower better lives and health for everyone, the current challenges in the health insurance space and how it may evolve going forward.

1. What key issues within health insurance gave dacadoo the idea of building the Digital Health Engagement Platform?

The idea around our Digital Health Engagement Platform (DHEP) came to me after developing software for insurance companies over the course of 30 years. 

It became clear to me that the insurance industry is getting ready for the digital transformation that we have seen over the last 10 years in retail, entertainment, travel and banking. The insurance industry is by nature a very conservative industry. P&C (Property and Casualty insurance) has changed, but the health or life insurance industries are obviously more complex and have many different products/cost areas to be contracted.

The key driver for founding dacadoo was to help health & life insurance operators become more relevant in people’s lives. This would lead to better touch points that would help them lead with much-needed innovation and cost containment practices. We have seen healthcare costs explode globally and it became clear to the industry that change is really needed to become Relevant, Easy and Fun, which we call the REF Factor here at dacadoo.

2. Where do you see the primary challenges within health insurance and has this changed since/during the lockdown? If so, how?

The health insurance industry, in my eyes, has a very promising future and a big challenge to conquer over the coming years.

Today’s health insurance operator is a contracting partner for the consumer, meaning they receive monthly payments from the consumer, and they distribute the capital and hope that they got their underwriting models right, which are in most cases based on statistical backwards-looking data.

As Niels Bohr –a Nobel physicist– said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. This means that the health insurance industry needs to become proactive and drive value higher, meant in a positive way, rather than just being a capital provider/bill payer. The risk is that they may end up like the Telcos, becoming a “fat pipe” of capital, rather than the Netflix of the industry. (7x EBITDA versus 40x EBITDA).

3. How do you expect the demand for AI and data driven healthcare decisions to evolve in the next five years? And where does the biggest challenge to solve lie?

I believe that healthcare and insurance have one of the most promising futures around AI and data driven decision-making. 

Insurance in its current form, as we know today, has always been about data and decision making. It has just been analogue and driven by table based statistical thinking, which is changing now, as the consumer is more @home and a lot more digital aware. 

There will not be a future in health insurance without telemedicine, virtual coaching and testing/health screening at home. Doctors can remotely take decisions more efficiently, which in turn is faster, cheaper and more convenient for the consumer. During the Covid crisis, even the most conservative doctors have adopted telemedicine and video conferencing tools. When I presented at classical healthcare organizations just a few years ago, they were very sceptical and thought this would take years to implement.

The changes we have seen over the last 12 months have been more prominent than the combined changes over the last 10 years and this is both on the payer and provider side of the business.

4. dacadoo also provides its Risk Engine. How does that work exactly? And in what way does it help the insurer assess risk?

The dacadoo Risk Engine was our ‘lucky punch’. We launched it in 2018 and it was the first Risk Engine in the world to provide real-time scoring of life & health, including lifestyle data. 

The dacadoo Risk Engine was the foundation behind the Health Score when we started our deep research and scoring technology 10 years ago. In the beginning, we didn’t have a reference model or industry models, so we created very powerful AI-models around imputation of healthcare data. Our Risk Engine has been scoring based on over 300 million person-years of clinical data. 

The powerful aspect of this model is that it can estimate relative risks on both mortality and morbidity, giving a holistic view of risk, integrating the models based on clinical research around chronic diseases. At dacadoo, we believe that any successful health insurance operator in the future will need to take a proactive approach towards chronic disease. Chronic diseases have created 85% of the mortalities that we have seen during the Covid crisis; 85% of the people who unfortunately passed away from Covid had one or multiple chronic diseases.

Successful health insurers should have a key interest in looking after the health of their clients, which they can do with the Health Engagement Platform (the Health Score) and they should have a proactive approach to understanding the risk and the lifestyle of their consumers. If they keep them healthy, they cost less, they live longer and thereby pay more premium – it sounds so simple, so why are health insurance companies not more active in this regard? That’s a question you could ask yourself.

5. Looking forward, what do you think will be the key technology enablers for driving innovation and progress in health insurance?

Data will be the biggest single innovator in health insurance. According to IBM, only 1% of all healthcare data is currently being used in the health insurance industry in a dynamic way. The key problem is that the health insurance industry came from a classical mainframe industry with so-called “silos of data”.

The future is about non-invasive health data collection, where Internet of Things (IoT) can provide our health data and lifestyle data in a very dynamic and non-disturbing way for the consumer. The insurance company will have automated alert systems that will help you automatically understand that now your blood pressure is too high or your Health Score too low or that you are due a blood test.

6. What health insurance operators do you believe will succeed?

Going forward the biology and IoT will get closer to each other and health data collection will happen automatically.

I believe that health insurance companies that have a dynamic wellness and disease prevention platform, –those who will help and improve the overall wellness of their clients through a platform that integrates a dynamic Points System for client stickiness–, will become successful. At dacadoo we call this #WECARE. Meaning that in a digital world, it is all about convenience and relevance. The insurance operator really needs to show that they care about your health, that they are efficient and that they provide the best possible care at the lowest possible price.

That’s why we founded dacadoo: to help the insurance operator become digital, consumer-driven and more efficient in their underwriting, back office and case handling.

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