ICICI Lombard launched search registry for hospitals, treatment, surgery cost

Using the portal, customers can compare prices in various hospitals

Private general insurance company ICICI Lombard has launched 'Health Advisor' which is a search registry for hospitals, treatments available and the costs for the same. Launched with information about 10 cities, this facility is available for all customers.

The insurer has created a hospital and consumer feedback based rating mechanism wherein consumers can get treatment related details and gain from actual experience from patients for over 1,000 hospitals across primary, secondary and tertiary segments. The insurance company has made this possible by sourcing feedback and over 10,000 ratings from customers who had availed treatment at these hospitals.

Bhargav Dasgupta, MD & CEO, ICICI Lombard General Insurance said: "To help our customers take informed decisions, we have taken the initiative to build a comprehensive information and ratings framework through the Health Advisor platform. For this, we have harnessed our access to healthcare providers and collated feedback from a large set of customers to build a robust platform."

This portal is an open access platform that can be availed of by consumers through a website for this purpose. Using this platform, a customer can compare cost of treatment for a particular ailment among hospitals and also compare quality of care for a particular ailment among hospitals. It also gives an option to compare hospitals on the basis of infrastructure, room and procedure costs. Customer feedback and ratings on hospitals with authentication is also available on the portal. Over and above, obtaining appointments at the hospital of their choice can also be done.

ICICI Lombard Health Advisor provides information on more than 30 treatment procedures, which have been selected on the basis of incidence rate. The procedures include removal of appendix, hernia, piles etc. It also provides information on bypass surgery, cataract operation, knee replacement surgery among others.

To ensure robustness of the platform, ICICI Lombard has partnered with Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) to identify quality indicators to compare healthcare providers in the Indian context. Starting with a comprehensive list of more than 5000 parameters, TISS and ICICI Lombard arrived at a set of 20 indicators that were relevant in an Indian context, comprehensive and easy to capture across hospitals. The insurance company will continue to add ratings to its customer repository and expand the current base of 1,000 hospitals in the coming months.