New Delhi: In order to make health insurance products affordable, insurers need to innovate and focus on new techniques around data analytics, industry body Ficci has said in a joint report.

With skyrocketing medical costs, more and more people will look for health insurance products to secure themselves, said the Ficci-Towers Watson report.

Various data point to the severity of adverse financial impact of ill health for the economically weaker sections of the society, it said.

"(The data) clearly suggests that it is imperative for health insurance to innovate by focusing on new techniques around data analytics like predictive modelling etc to improve the products on offer thereby increasing the market penetration and product affordability for the customer," the report said.

Indian insurance companies are not oblivious to data analytics, it said, adding that most of them are enabled with powerful IT systems to capture transactional claims data.

The need therefore is to come up with novel methods of using this data to incorporate advanced techniques such as predictive modelling and simpler approaches like customer segmentation before writing a policy, the report said.

Not only will data analytics help improve existing business functions, it will also help forecast the future better and write more profitable business, it added.

Besides, Ficci said that effective implementation of data analysis methodologies can help track fraudulent claims and stringent measure may be taken to punish cheats.

Such preventive systems to minimise instances of fraud have already been successfully set up in the US and UK markets, it said.

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