Health Finance Digest: Wellness-Linked Insurance, incentivizing health
NCDs are not only the deadliest diseases in the world – leading to over 40 million global deaths per year – but also some of the most expensive due to their chronic nature. If we continue with business as usual, NCDs will cost the global economy nearly $50 trillion in the next 20 years. Emerging health insurance models focused on wellness and prevention could reduce these costs and avert millions of new NCD cases and deaths.
Wellness-linked insurance programs offer members incentives to engage in healthy behaviors. These models show great promise in reducing healthcare costs and improving health outcomes. This is particularly true for NCDs, which require ongoing treatment and monitoring, and can result in complications that are both dangerous to the patient’s health and expensive to treat. Additionally, wellness-linked insurance harnesses the power of digital data tracking for monitoring and improving population health. Through digital tracking, these programs present themselves as a promising inclusion for Universal Health Coverage as an avenue for promoting access to care and financial protection for the poor. Further, these programs have been shown to increase medicine adherence.
Although low-income customers could benefit greatly from wellness-linked programs that employ digital tracking devices, the issue with wellness-linked insurance models at present is that they serve primarily middle- and high-income customers. The opportunity to digitally track health data creates the need for upfront investments in the public sector, which justifies further funding for quality and accessible NCD care in low-and middle-income countries.
Read HFI’s new blog below to learn more about wellness-linked insurance and how innovative finance solutions can expand these models to include lower-income customers.
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