Ican In Pact With 24 Firms To Offer Managed Care Benefits

Ican Medicare has tied up with 24 leading companies to offer managed care benefits, and will be launching new products for the corporate sector beginning tomorrow.

This comes in the wake of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) leaving it to the discretion of insurance companies whether or not the third party administrator (TPA) can distribute insurance covers and sell their own healthcare products.

"The Irda keeping the option open to insurance companies as to whether they would like the TPA to sell and distribute products, has given us a lot of leverage," said Ican managing director, George Mathew M.

The draft TPA regulations identify that TPAs will not be allowed to sell products, be they their own managed care products or the health risk covers of the general insurance companies. Request from private insurance players, which do not any have distribution mechanism in place, will be reflected in the final regulations.

The major paradox is that the state-insurers, who had canvassed against the TPAs being allowed to sell health products, are now in talks with them for meeting their distribution needs as well.

Meanwhile, Ican is launching a new array of managed care benefits in the country tomorrow. Ican has tied up with PricewaterhouseCoopers (in Delhi), Amway, National Panasonic, Bharati Telenet Services, Bharati Mobile, AXA Business Services (an offshore division of AXA Insurance of the UK), and GE Power Control, among a host of others.

Ican is offering a whole range of services from cashless hospitalisation to claim discounting, from emergency funds to 24-hours national hotline, as well as a host of other services. Ican has been rendering managed care services to more than 300 corporates, through its six regional offices and 32 centres. It has a network of 1,200 hospitals across the country for planned treatment.