Patients Can Soon Enjoy An Integrated Platform Which Can Process Health Insurance Claims Faster

Imagine this: just recently, you fell ill and had to pay a hefty sum for your treatment.

While you have health insurance, you’ll have to wait a while for your documents to be assessed. And that’s a lot of waiting time.

Sounds familiar?

Well, with this new platform coming up, the long arduous wait might just be reduced significantly.

Patients Can Soon Enjoy An Integrated Platform Which Can Process Health Insurance Claims Faster

On Monday (15 Mar), it was reported that patients will soon enjoy a new integrated platform for their health insurance claims.

The General Insurance Association Singapore (GIA Singapore), Life Insurance Association Singapore (LIA Singapore), and Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) have gotten together to call for proposals on a new end-to-end health insurance claims platform.

The call for proposal opens up on 15 Mar 2021 and will close on 26 Apr 2021.

The Proposed Platform

With the platform, healthcare providers will be able to access the platform to retrieve information about a patient’s policy coverage, including Integrated Shield Plans, group hospital and surgical insurance.

On the patients’ part, they can easily authorise access to relevant data through the SingPass app to healthcare providers and insurers.

To make the entire claims process faster, healthcare providers will also be allowed to submit claims to insurers on behalf of the patients.

Other information that can be easily accessed on the platform include:

• Billing and medical data from healthcare providers
• Bill information
• Patient’s status

An Integrated Eco-System

According to IHiS assistant chief executive Guai Eng Chun, the reason why health insurance claims processing is mostly paper-based is that information has to be exchanged between different systems.

“This may take up to months and inconvenience patients.”

By digitising information, and allowing seamless sharing, however, it’ll bring about greater convenience to patients and speed up end-to-end claims.

After development, the system will go live.

Policyholders from Great Eastern will be the first to access the system in a pilot.

It will eventually be scaled up and rolled out across Singapore.

On the hospital’s side, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, National University Hospital (NUH) and Singapore General Hospital (SGH) will be taking part in the pilot.

You can check out their Call For Proposal here for more details.

What do you think about the upcoming system, and will it help set your mind at ease too?

On a separate note, for those interested, do you know much about freelancer insurance in Singapore? You can read more about it here.

Feature Image: PSawanpanyalert / Shutterstock.com