Ah! This one has been pending on me for a long time. But as the cozy winters and holiday season are here I felt to wrap up things I wanted to finish this year. After all this year I was trying to push my boundaries and put myself in challenging situations. Putting my ideas and learnings into blogs also being one :p. Another such experiment was participating in a hackathon with no prep beforehand.
What was the challenge for me?
I'm mostly an introvert person and to speak up in front of even 10 people is daunting for me. Participating in a hackathon where I'll need to brainstorm ideas with unknown folks would be a bit outside my comfort zone. I had participated in hackathons during my undergrad days but had mostly worked alongside my college friends. Nonetheless, I channeled my inner coder strength to convince myself to participate and meet some tech-savvy women in the process. Yep, that was the motivation! :)
What was wmn;2023?
It was an onsite women only 24 hour long hackathon organised by Devfolio.
Ideation Phase
I was working at an insure-tech company back then and had some understanding of problems faced by Indian insurance companies and the gaps in customer expectations and insurance limitations while I was very impressed with the insurance systems in first world countries like Singapore. I thought of building a project on a similar idea. At the hackathon, I met a girl working in healthcare and we brainstormed our ideas for the prototype.
What did we build?
The idea was to solve the overall claims experience at the provider end i.e. insurance providers to be able to detect fraudulent claims and reject them as well as ensure an entire cashless flow from the customer's end without the manual intervention for customers to preserve the receipts from the consultation/treatment and uploading it later to get a reimbursement.
How was it solving the provider experience?
One of the major pain point of an insurance provider is to be able to detect a fraudulent claim. Especially in OPDs with low ticket size, the possibility of fraud increases even more and that is one of the reasons why insurance providers in India don't go for OPD included in the benefits. Another problem is data not being shared by different providers leads to a chance of duplicate claims.
How was it solving customers' experience?
OPD coverage - Most insurance providers in India do not provide OPD coverage. However, from the customers' point of view, this is the biggest economic cost center in health. With lesser possibility of frauds, insurance providers will be able to offer more holistic coverage including OPDs.
Cashless experience - Most of the insurances have a reimbursement flow and no coverage for OPD which leads to saving all the receipts, uploading them, and waiting for weeks for it to be approved.
Privacy of PII data - If there is a central system for storing all the health records, as a customer I should be able to control that data access. Each time an insurer requests my data, I should be able to control what document data I want to share, and only upon my authorization should that data be shared.
Demo link
Adding a demo link for the project -
Video - https://www.loom.com/share/5d235242d6f14470ba1bbcb7830a8c96?sid=48fdd704-788b-4b80-82b4-d1cb63490b72
Project link - https://devfolio.co/projects/insurease-50a3
Winning the grand prize
And yeah that was it. After a really long time, I pushed myself to stay up for ~30 hrs to finish the prototype project as a solo developer. After all, it was about pushing my boundaries. I saw the announcement on twitter the next day. :)