NIB, Cigna in health care joint venture
HEALTH insurer NIB has entered a joint venture with US giant Cigna to create a data science and services company to help catch health issues earlier and cut down on costly hospitalisations.
NIB and the New York-listed insurer and provider will each put $10 million into the project, which will be independent of both and led by NIB executive Rhod McKensey.
NIB managing director Mark Fitzgibbon told analysts the joint venture fit into NIB’s vision of delivering genuine health care, rather than just “sick care”.
The joint venture will analyse data on members and suggest ways NIB or other insurance clients can work to improve their health such as preventing diabetes.
The joint venture could also directly offer services on improving the mental health of at-risk members, and on posthospital discharges.
Mr Fitzgibbon said NIB already had a lot of information on its members – their gender, age, location, whether they lived alone, and their claims history.
He said the company might be able to access MyHealth records and use members’ genetic profiles if given permission in the near future.
NIB had given the ethical, privacy and cybersecurity concerns “a significant amount of thought and planning”, Mr Fitzgibbon said.
The patient data will be transmitted to the joint venture for analysis in a “tokenised” form, with numbers replacing names, to protect patient privacy.
“There’s a lot of slippery slopes about privacy, maybe in 10 years we’ll say we shouldn’t have done this or that, but we can’t let that risk stop us from doing what we think is the best thing for our members and for society in general,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.