CFC released its first report on the digital healthcare market which examines CFC’s own claims and enquiry data from the last five years to assess the factors that have been driving growth, identify key trends and investigate the most common types of claims.
Key findings
Demand for digital health insurance
“Digital healthcare has forced its way from the margins since we first launched our global digital health insurance proposition in 2017, to become a mainstream part of everyday life ,” said Tim Boyce, Head of Professions and Healthcare at CFC. “Since then, we’ve seen enquiries for our digital health insurance jump from less than 9% of our total enquiries for healthcare insurance to hit 49% last year. This is all the more noteworthy against a backdrop of yearly double-digit growth in our traditional healthcare enquiries. ”
In addition to growth in demand in the UK, Canada and Australia, CFC is now seeing enquiries from a wide selection of countries including Israel, Ireland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Croatia and Singapore.
The biggest movers in digital healthcare
The biggest sector represented in CFC’s digital healthcare portfolio continues to be telemedicine, largely due to its reliance on well-established and widely accessible technology. While CFC is seeing increasing demand for cover from other digital health sectors, telemedicine continues to grow its share of CFC’s digital healthcare business, highlighting ongoing demand for such services.
Remote patient monitoring solutions now represent 12% of CFC’s overall digital healthcare portfolio. Given the pressure on hospitals and the benefits of early intervention provided by remote monitoring, there is real demand to expand the prevalence of these solutions.
Claims trends
CFC’s digital health claims experience of the past five years bears testament to the fact that providing healthcare services digitally presents exposures that traditional entities may not have had to contend with previously. Bodily injury for example can be the result of a technology failure or cyber incident.
While medical misdiagnosis remains the biggest single source of claims, IP and cyber claims represent over a third of digital healthcare claims received. Both categories could easily find themselves at the centre of a disputed liability negotiation if different insurers and different policies were involved.
Future trends
With high adoption rates and extensive funding continuing, there is no sign that the digital healthcare industry will slow down in 2023. Having assessed industry trends and its insurance enquiry demands, CFC believes:
“The fast developments and adoption of AI, VR and AR, especially in areas like surgery, have already seen ground-breaking results, but the risk and exposures are often left uncovered. Even general practitioners, operating largely at a traditional level, still have digital exposures and most are unaware of the consequences ,” concludes Boyce. “ The education of the digital health industry and those that work across it is paramount to its continued success and growth. This creates an excellent opportunity for the insurance market to work closely with clients in this sector and develop more partnership-styled relationships. ”
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