The insurance company DKV has invested 9.4 million euros in the last four years in developing its digital ecosystem, an activity that it leads from the Barcelona Health Hub (BHH), where its innovation center, the DKV Innolab for Digital Health, is located.
Josep Santacreu, CEO of the insurer, highlights that the pandemic was a paradigm shift for digitization. “Now the insurance business is no longer conceived without offering services such as telemedicine or video consultations,” he says. Our telemedicine platform Quiero Cuidarme Más has approached half a million downloads and has carried out more than a million sessions since its creation”.
The platform, explained Santacreu, responds to a holistic concept of health, beyond medicine, which includes the promotion of healthy habits. But it also offers medical consultations: in 2021, the company attended 170,000 medical chats, and its use is growing at rates of 47% per year.
Elena Torrente, deputy director of digital health at DKV and head of Innolab, points out that the group has 15 people focused on digitizing healthcare, five of whom are at Innolab, on the BHH site in Sant Pau. “We opened in 2020, with the purpose of relating to start-ups, from there or from one of the networks and innovation associations that we are part of, such as EIT Health. The backbone of our health platform is designed internally, with the support of external IT developers, but we are looking for apps to monitor highly prevalent ailments. We try to identify the best on the market to integrate it into our platform.” Thus, she explains, DKV now has a “challenge” open to develop mental health apps. “We ask for proposals and maybe we help her with a proof of concept and a test in a real environment. If the response and evaluation of the patients is good, we integrate it into our platform, already establishing a formal collaboration contract”, she assures.
Innolab also carries out its own R&D projects in digital health, “in many cases, with the support of public aid”. And, finally, DKV has a test space, as well as a showroom, which can be used by entrepreneurs to present and test their applications in a real environment. There it also exhibits its own developments, which it has come to market among other firms, such as Allianz.
DKV obtains 86% of its income from healthcare insurance, a branch in which it grew by 9% last year, the highest rate among private health groups. The group had a turnover of 793 million euros, excluding Marina Salud, the concessionaire of the Dénia hospital, which reverted to public health in September.
