Vienna’s hi.health launches Europe’s first digital health account, solves private insurance cash flow gap
While universal healthcare is something we know as normal life here in Europe, it’s not always all-inclusive. In Germany alone, 26.8 million people have some form of supplementary insurance, for example covering hospital stays or dentures.
Unlike the statutory health insurance programmes that interface directly between government agencies and healthcare providers, private insurance programmes often run off a, “you as the patient pay for it, we’ll reimburse you" model. In this way, the privately insured initially shoulder the cost, and then simply have to wait until their claim is processed, with no clear indication of when that money will arrive.
In the vast majority of cases, this is done in an archaic manner, that is, the tabulation of paper receipts and a trip to the post office. Serial entrepreneur Fredrik Debong who revolutionised the diabetes treatment market years back with mySugr, and hi.health co-founder Sebastian Gruber knew there had to be a better way.
In 2019 the duo launched hi.health, an app through which users can have their health expenses submitted to nearly every private health insurance firm in Germany in a complete and total digital format. The app uses AI-based character recognition technology to automatically extract data from images of receipts, populates insurance claim forms and submits them. No more copies of copies, envelopes, stamps, and hoping things all arrived, i.e. 21st-century private healthcare claims submissions.
