ayushman bharat is a positive development as it will create massive awareness about health insurance among those who are still not covered mayank bathwal ceo aditya birla health insurance tells et wealthhow has aditya birla health insurance differentiated itself from its peersthere is clearly a need for health insurance as the penetration is low and the cost of healthcare is rising most people think group covers are sufficient but this is misleading as it will not be there when they retire or quit their organisations after speaking to customers we realised that they felt health insurance was meeting a small part of their needs that is only hospitalisation claims therefore we adopted a slightly different approach we decided to talk about health rather than health insurance we do have a vested interest because if something good happens we will benefit as claims will be down to draw a large part of indian consumers who are 35 or younger and have largely stayed away from health insurance but are taking care of their health or are generally healthy we decided to incentivise them by offering 30 of the premium back every year we track their physical activity and health behaviour in addition to health assessment at the beginning of the year at our own cost this is possible because of technologysmartphones can be linked to our app to track active days secondly even if you contract lifestyle diseases we put you on a chronic care programme at no extra premium a health coach is appointed and complements the doctor of the policyholder we also have a cadre of care mangers who help you navigate the complex healthcare ecosystem in case of hospitalisation in our first financial year we have collected rs 250 crore in premium and covered a million liveswhat will be ayushman bharats impact on the healthcare and health insurance spacei think it is a positive development the big thing is that it will create massive awareness we could not have created awareness on this scale if i now go to prospective policyholders at least they would have heard about health insurance it will also bring in better healthcare infrastructure you will see further investment on the healthcare side which will help as we do face challenges around healthcare facilities in smaller towns also a lot of data will be collected technology and the ability to leverage it will become critical to manage healthcare data effectively yes there are some concerns around pricing but to me those are issues that will have to be tackled as we move ahead in the journey we will have to start somewhere some healthcare providers are not happy with package rates and we will see how it goescan it bring about some about some kind of standardisation in treatment costs will private health insurers benefit from itwe have been talking about standard treatment protocols this will be the beginning otherwise how will you have package rates they will work only if they are standard