L&T Insurance and E-Meditek Global have jointly launched a pre-paid card for instant cashless claim authorisation, called MediCash Card.
The card will reduce the time taken for approvals for cashless health insurance policies. It is currently available only to L&T Insurance's corporate customers, but will be extended to individual customers by the end of this year, said Joydeep Roy, CEO and Wholetime Director, L&T Insurance.
Since it is a pre-paid card Visa and Ratnakar Bank are the other partners in this alliance.
To begin with the card can be used at 400 hospitals across the country. When a customer has to be admitted all he has to do is to swipe MediCash Card at the Point of Sale (POS) terminal. The information about the customer's policy details are filled on the POS machine.
After this the cashless authorization slip is generated, similar to the authorisation that happens now in case of a cashless policy. This is followed by a confirmation call to the customer. Currently the authorisation procedure takes a minimum of four hours as the hospital has to send details to the insurance company and wait for the company to fax the authorisation slip back to the hospital.
With MediCash the whole procedure will be much faster.
“Information about all categories of diseases and procedures and their rates are available when the card is swiped at the POS terminal. The rates have been fixed with the hospital before hand. This will take care of issues like inflated hospital bills. Even payments to hospital will be faster,'' said Roy.
The card will also make it possible to introduce Out Patient Insurance (OPD) Plans or dental insurance plans, said Gopal Verma, Chairman, E-Meditek Global. “OPD expenses account for about 70% of healthcare expenditure. We will also try to integrate pre and post hospitalisation services on the card by tying up with doctors and wellness centres,'' he said.
While currently L&T Insurance is the only one to offer this card, E-Meditek will also work with other insurance companies to offer the same card, Verma added.
