Regional Health Insurance Providers Mull to Increase Affordability with Innovative Payment Scheme

Dubai: Affordability and value-based pricing are driving innovative payment schemes in the regional healthcare insurance sector, as governments in MENA introduce mandatory insurance policies targeting better healthcare systems and improved funding from the private sector.

Earlier this year, Dubai Health Insurance Corporation explained that there is fierce competition in the healthcare insurance sector. By January 2019 over 50 insurance companies, 23 third-party administrators (TPAs), and 103 brokers or intermediaries were already operating in the UAE alone. Meanwhile, after the introduction of employer unified health insurance policy for the private sector in KSA, the health insurance captured 52.9% of the total market size.

The regulators say this coupled with increasing lifestyle diseases among the growing population, and high purchasing power has resulted in insurers introducing quality plans that are affordable and provide value-based payments reimbursement schemes such as managed care plans and outcome-based models.

The 5th MENA Health Insurance Congress happening on 1-3 October at the Millennium Airport Hotel in Dubai, is the premier gathering for key healthcare insurance stakeholders from the region and the globe to highlight the efforts made to develop the health insurance market in the MENA region and further to explore how the regulators, payers and providers can collaborate more closely through technology use, what are the critical dynamics and the drivers of the business tools and to improve cost containment strategies in the healthcare financing system as well as discuss innovative business models in targeted geographies in MENA.

The MENA region is now faced with an unparalleled and unprecedented rise in demand for health care over the course of the next two decades. It is estimated that the total Health-care spending in the region will reach US$60 billion in 2025, up from US$12 billion today. No other region in the world faces such rapid growth in demand with the simultaneous need to realign its Healthcare systems to be able to treat the disorders of affluence.