Demographic development, medical progress and changing lifestyles are resulting in costly medical treatments. These place a strain on healthcare systems worldwide – whatever stage of development they are in. The main challenge is the steep upward trend in chronic diseases.
Daman National Health Insurance, in which Munich Re’s Munich Health operation has a 20% stake, has opened a new medical service centre in Abu Dhabi. Together with almeda GmbH, Munich-Re-Group’s assistance and telemedical healthcare service provider, this centre offers healthcare programmes to patients with chronic diabetes and obesity. These healthcare services are an integral part of Munich Health’s business model, along with programmes for acute diseases (case management) and for the treatment of chronic diseases (disease management). In the same way as complementary prevention programmes, they help ease the cost burden from (potential) diseases. Wolfgang Strassl, CEO of Munich Health: “Our business model combines global know-how with local knowledge. We are steadily expanding our extensive partnerships with primary insurers. Above all, this benefits the policyholders, ensuring that high-quality healthcare services will continue to be affordable in the future.”
Unless preventive measures are taken, it will not be long before diabetes and obesity become especially common in the United Arab Emirates. Daman in Abu Dhabi has therefore focused initially on treatment of those two conditions. Under the disease management programme, specially trained coaches will give regular counselling to the chronically sick over the telephone in order to improve their quality of life in the long term and coordinate the diabetes therapy. Daman has therefore been involved in making the cultural changes needed to adjust the telemedical healthcare programmes successfully run in Germany for many years to the Arabian market. Stefan Kottmair, almeda’s CEO: “For the first time, we have successfully deployed our wide-ranging telemedical expertise in the international market. Special software is used to ensure the operational processes run efficiently.”
Michael Bitzer, CEO of Daman National Health Insurance: “Although the launch was only eight weeks ago, we have already had positive feedback from our patients. Our local coaches benefit in their contacts with the patients from the comprehensive training given by almeda and Munich Health.”
