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Paul Gambon, sales and marketing director of Medicash, spoke with Health & Protection about the rapid growth in digital health benefits and reaching new frontiers of medical insight.
He also explains plans to give employers greater insight into the health of their workforces and provide evidence on the return on investment (ROI) for their health cash plan benefits.
Your health cash plan membership has continued growing in recent years, what are the key reasons for this?
At the start of 2020 we had 277,000 policies and we expect to hit 700,000 by the end of this year, meaning we will have increased our policy base by two-and-a-half times in the space of just five years.
The way we can do that at scale is by improving how we work as a business, which has been our digital transformation and investment in technology to make our customers’ lives easier and better.
That extends to our adviser community, along with the individual companies and the decision makers, who are operating and administrating their schemes through our online corporate portal.
What is driving employer decisions and adviser recommendations?
Cash benefits are always going to be a key part of our health plans. As part of relaunching our Proactive plan earlier this year we looked at the areas and the ways we could improve our plans further.
We wanted to make sure we added value for our customers, so rather than focusing on low-usage benefits, we increased the allowances for dental, optical and complementary therapies, which are the most used benefits on our plans.
Those are going to be the things people value most, therefore we focused on those areas, as well as bringing two new digital benefits in as well.
Is the ability to provide cover for the whole of the workforce a key consideration?
Absolutely. Something we talk about often is, who does a health cash plan appeal to? And really it’s everybody; there’s something for everyone in every demographic, as they cover everyday health needs that affect us all.
I’ve heard that, at some companies where a health cash plan is offered up to a certain salary and private medical insurance above that, there can be resistance from people changing benefits upon promotion, saying they would rather keep the cash plan because they use it more regularly.
A health cash plan can be used by anyone and therefore everyone will receive value at an affordable level that’s more justifiable to employers.
How significant is the adoption of digital services?
There’s been significant uptake across our whole digital benefits offering.
With pressure on the NHS to see a doctor, virtual GPs can be a more accessible method nowadays.
However, virtual GPs have limitations, so we’ve tried to work on the clarity of when each is appropriate because we don’t want to waste people’s time accessing a virtual GP when it really needs to be their own GP.
SkinVision has seen Medicash’s policholders undertake more than 255,000 skin scans since it was launched in June 2020 and that has resulted in more than 1,400 clinically validated skin cancers being detected.
This is crucial because it could involve someone whose issue might have gone undetected, allowing it to progress further. Left unchecked, it might have spread and become significantly more serious.
I’ve got a personal example with a member of my family, who had a small spot on her face, hardly even a mole.
I used SkinVision on her face and it immediately came back with a high-risk indicator, which was surprising, and subsequently she’s had treatment for skin cancer on her face. As it was caught so early, the treatment was also much less invasive.
What is your approach to innovation in digital health benefits?
We see ourselves as innovators in the sector so to introduce new benefits such as Eargym and HealthLens to the wider population aligns with our strategy.
We already cover teeth, eyes and muscles and realised hearing was another crucial element to support. Around one in six working age adults in the UK experience some degree of hearing loss and its impact can be profound.
Rather than introducing a cash benefit, we thought it would be more useful to our wider policyholder base to offer practical, everyday ways to improve their hearing, so launched Eargym.
As well as helping people to identify hearing issues as early as possible, it’s also allowing them to do something about it by training their ears and brain to better identify sounds through a series of games and tests
Eargym found that users experience a 20% increase in listening performance within just seven weeks of consistent use, with 83% stating they felt a noticeable improvement in their hearing and 68% finding it easier to follow conversations in noisy environments.
HealthLens is unique because you use your smartphone to scan the blood flow under your face – it is quite remarkable and really exciting.
It’s detecting changes to blood flow and is looking at health indicators such as your blood pressure, your heart rate variability and your mental stress.
Again, you can identify potential health risks as early as possible; some risks people may be aware of, but we’re trying to identify those that people who have risks that they are not aware of.
That may be the catalyst to do something about it.
We don’t want to scare people, but just present them with the factual information based on their own health, so they can then make an informed decision.
Part of the purpose is that you do a monthly check to help spot any health trends or changes over time – and whether it is improving or getting worse.
How are you addressing demand for greater data and ROI?
We’re keen to support our corporate customers in demonstrating the value they’re getting through having a health cash plan, to make it tangible.
They’ll have a lot of anecdotal evidence, but it’s even better if we can evidence the impact having a cash plan has on their workforce.
Our intention is to use data from our benefits to provide anonymised details, so they have a better understanding of the overall health of their workforce.
Nothing will be identifiable to individuals, but it will be able to provide employers with a basic overall health score for their business as it stands and how it’s changed.
Hopefully it will improve over time as employees use the other benefits of their cash plan, but it’s also a metric that will allow a company to understand how healthy or unhealthy their workforce is, because I think the majority of companies won’t have any clue or certainly no data.
The intention is to help provide companies with tangible data that they can use to show their return on investment and hopefully, and more importantly, the proof that their staff members are in a better place health wise due to the interventions they’ve taken.
What is the general state of the cash plan market?
Awareness has definitely improved but still probably is not quite as good as it could be, so there’s a huge opportunity for a lot of employers and advisers.
If people fully understood the benefits of health cash plans, I’d argue there should be no employer who does not offer it.
Why wouldn’t every employer in the country want to offer a low-cost way to support their employee health and why wouldn’t an adviser want to talk about them as a viable option for employers?
We are a significant cash plan provider and yet only cover just 1% of the UK population.
The market is growing and there’s huge upside and potential in the appetite of employers to have a health benefit to offer their workforce.