Impact of Health Applications on The Indian Health Insurance companies

Abstract

This thesis investigates how mobile health applications can create business development in terms of business model innovation/ customer value creation for Indian health insurance companies. Recent years have noted the increasing prevalence of smartphones and an expansion of their user base across all age ranges. A growing amount of health-related mobile applications is flooding the application market and the digitization of the health sector processes rapidly with digital offerings becoming more and more popular. Firstly, a literature review is conducted to gather relevant important information and to build a theoretical background on the concepts of mobile health applications, big data, the business model concept and app-enabled business value creation. In order to filter out the role of health applications for Indian health insurance companies, knowledgable employees of health insurance companies are asked to participate in a selfadministered online survey around health application offering of their company. The results of the online survey are thus analyzed using an exploratory factor analysis and are then evaluated descriptively. Based on the findings a model is created that shows the underlying business value of mobile health applications. The overall finding of this thesis is that there are correlations between health applications and three main factors. Firstly, health apps can possibly influence customer retention and customer relationships. Second, health apps hold an underlying potential of aiding in the prevention of widespread diseases, early detection of diseases, treatment of diseases and offering targeted customer offers. And thirdly, there are big data possibilities such as detecting trends about the collectivity of insurant and the provision of targeted offers based on customer knowledge.