BUDAPEST/WARSAW - Eastern Europe is a new frontier for private medical care, and insurers and tech startups are racing to steal a march on their rivals by harnessing the region’s health data.
Now big insurance players in the region, including PZU, Generali, Vienna Insurance Group and Allianz, are looking to gather and analyze patient data from the fast-growing market to improve risk assessments and pricing. “We are seeing a health data boom that resembles the financial data boom from 10-15 years ago when the banking sector changed a lot,” said Maciej Malenda, head of partnerships at Infermedica, which works with PZU and Allianz.PZU, the region’s biggest insurer, said it was also looking into dozens of other startups to help it expand its health business.The trend was illustrated by Google’s plans to buy fitness-tracker maker Fitbit for $2.1 billion, announced late last year.
Attila Hevesi, a product development manager at Generali’s Hungarian division, said there was no comparison between the quantity and quality of data available for health insurance and, for example, car insurance. He declined to give details about that deal, but said Generali was incrementally improving its pricing in Hungary as a result of data-gathering.“Today, we are pricing based on clients’ data used for life insurance,” said Kooperativa board member Filip Kral.Another major challenge facing the nascent regional market is ensuring data privacy and security.
Elsewhere in Europe, a British hospital trust was rapped by privacy authorities two years ago for misusing data, after it passed on personal information of around 1.6 million patients to AI firm Google DeepMind.
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