With the expat package disappearing, are more people buying healthcare direct?
That is an emerging trend as the days of the gold-plated assignment with limousines have gone. However, we haven’t seen multinationals backing away from providing healthcare to expats. Companies still recognise that the biggest concern of expats in any country, after schooling and immigration, is navigating the healthcare system.
An emerging trend we have noticed, which plays well in our network strategy, is a greater emphasis on ‘what can be treated locally’. For example, if a female employee became pregnant 10 years ago in Asia, they would probably return home to deliver the child because of concerns about complications. That would apply to mental health issues, a chronic condition or if child had learning difficulties.
What multinationals and employees want now are solutions on the ground so the assignment does not get interrupted. They want the comfort of knowing that wherever they are assigned, be it India or Africa, there is a network of healthcare providers available.
What is Bupa Global doing to address the rising cost of healthcare?
Bupa has two ways of managing health costs on assignment. The first being to prevent them in the first place.
In our pre-assignment, we make sure that people know what Bupa covers. We provide a lot of information and advice around how to avoid on-assignment costs. However, if you’re on assignment, particularly if you’re there with family and for a period of time, you are going to incur healthcare costs.
We also manage costs through the mechanisms we have with providers to ensure we are getting the best possible rates. We have local clinicians, for example, who monitor care so that we don’t have people in hospital for weeks when we could get them home and provide nursing care.
If we make it easy to access outpatient care, we make the customer journey that much more pleasant because they are not worrying about submitting claims. We also get an opportunity to see what’s going on and if we can help with things such as patient advocacy or second opinions.
That’s far better than an individual sending us a shoe box full of claims six months down the track, which actually paints a pretty disturbing picture of a customer not getting the best advice.
We encourage people to use our outpatient network. It’s very convenient and enables us to build a picture of their emerging healthcare needs and, in many cases, intervene to make sure the customer has got all the information they need.
Managing network costs is probably the most effective tool that we have apart from avoiding the cost in the first place, which speaks to scale. We have more than 1.2 million providers in our network and we direct settle with a lot more than that.
We have a global approach to health and benefits. We have clinicians in the field advocating on behalf of our customers. That’s the best way of ensuring costs remain as affordable in what is a rising cost environment.
What are Bupa Global’s plans?
We’re still actively growing the business. Towards the end of last year, we acquired a Brazilian healthcare company, Care Plus, giving us access to networks in Brazil that strengthen what we had already.
You’ll see us continue on a growth agenda where it makes sense to either expand markets or extend our capability in markets where we are already present today.
The primary commitment from Bupa Global is that we will be there as changes emerge. You are going to see us reacting to legislation and getting involved in the development of legislation in some parts of the world. We’ll be there to make sure we’ve got structures in place to support our clients as the world changes.
