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What happens when a twenty­something, single, male­engineer is assigned with the task to develop a digital health service for expectant mothers at If, Scandinavia’s largest insurance company?

Some of you might be wondering why an insurance company wants to do something like that in the first place. The answer is simple – we want to transform our traditional role of only offering services for when something bad happens. Instead we want to think:

WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP OUR CUSTOMERS LIVE A SAFER AND HEALTHIER LIFE?

Also during times that don’t include accidents. Challenge: Understanding customer needs

Our first step was to assess the needs of expectant mothers. As insurers we may know plenty about risk, but the softer side is new to us. After brainstorming for hours with two of my male colleagues, a lawyer and an economist, we had successfully found out that we know nothing about (pregnant) women. It seemed like a good idea to get closer to the target customer. Two of my colleagues were engaged, but unfortunately there were no babies in sight. For some reason, all eyes turned on me. Instead of establishing a family, I headed to App Store and downloaded the most popular pregnancy app on the market. The app was built around pregnancy weeks, offering concrete tips and valid information on the development of my body and the baby. I figured “If the app is so popular, it must teach me something about the kind of services our target customer is seeking”. I took it into use with enthusiasm and informed my colleagues. Bad move! At the office, the word of course soon got out that I’m ‘pregnant’.. After following my progression for six weeks (in three separate trimesters), I had actually become quite the expert on my daily happenings and restrictions on exercise and nutrition ­ and also knowing which colleagues to avoid. Apart from all the witty remarks, I learned that one could fill a library with information related to pregnancy. With additional research, our main finding was that there are hundreds of questions one might have during pregnancy related to daily activities and pregnancy progression, but no good place to get medically valid information in real time – which likely creates stress and uncertainty. We committed to providing a way to answer all the questions and remove this uncertainty.

Service Development

Instead of reinventing the wheel, we looked up existing solutions to our problem. Of all the options, the Finnish startup Meedoc had already brilliantly gotten to the heart of the issue with their remote doctor app, through which expectant mothers can ask anything from nurses with a chat function. Not wanting to compete on an area outside our core, we contacted Meedoc to find common ground and build a solution in collaboration. The development challenges were not that much related to building the app, as Meedoc had the right software in place. A new thing was integrating with Apple Health Kit, as we wanted to try out smart blood­pressure sensors with the services. The biggest challenges were actually building the service into our existing If insurance processes, that are designed around risk and insurance products. Traditionally most service innovations have come from within, so where to plug­in an external service so that it’s convenient for customers, and how to communicate about it both internally and externally?

The Result

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This September, after three months of active development, we’re launching a limited pilot called “If Maternity Clinic” app, offering our baby insurance customers a direct chat function to contact nurses. With it our customers can ask anything health­related during their pregnancy ­ when they want and as often as they like. A select group will also be able to monitor their health with a smart blood­pressure monitor integrated with the app.

For an insurance company chiefly focusing on risk, developing a service like this is seriously cool. With the pilot we aim to refine the service and scale it to all our baby insurance customers in Finland, and then to other Nordic Countries. The project is thus taking If into an area where we offer value­adding services to our customers, not only insurance products. The project is also a great example of open innovation, where the best solutions are sourced both internally and externally. Collaboration with Meedoc has led to other fruitful talks, and we hope to work with them more in future. We also actively welcome other startups and more mature companies to innovate future digital services with us when it comes to Connected Health, Car, and Health. Our vision is to help our partners take on the Nordics with us, after which the road to world is open!