RapydCare - digital health insurance

Accessible, Affordable and Fast Life & Healthcare insurances.

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Inspiration

Our deep life experiences led us to creating this app - a small-ticket digital insurance platform for Healthcare and Life insurances - for Individuals and Businesses. [Simple insurances for the simple people].

Experience 1 My father (god rest his soul) ran a successful small business in India. Around 40+ people worked under him making textile machineries in three shifts in his heydays. He took care of their medical bills through his personal tie-ups with a local clinic and a pharmacy sending them paychecks directly. This was 30 years ago.

In the year 2001, one of the employees, a family friend, had an accident operating a machinery in an unusual way at the workplace, and unfortunately passed. My father paid compensation to the family out of his pocket. But that was not it. The late employee's son had to drop out of school to support the family and take up jobs. If there was something that ensured the financial security of the family at the time, the son may have had a different life, and a higher education.

Experience 2 My wife's uncle owns a couple of commercial trucks transporting goods across states. Last year, he had to temporarily hire a driver for an one-time delivery job some 200+ miles away. The driver had a cardiac arrest while on the move, and breathed his last in the vehicle. My wife's uncle paid compensation to the driver's family.

The two events are around 20 years apart but show that nothing much has changed. A statistic says that only 35% of people of India (18% urban, 17% rural) have some kind of insurance. For a nation with 1.3 billion people, that is too low.

Several people go to work at small businesses / as freelancers / independent workers / unorganized sectors - and they go uninsured ending up facing medical costs and disruptions in their family's lives.

The Problem

  1. Most Small businesses do not have any group insurance plans for the employees since the insurances may not be affordable and their employees may change jobs frequently, month-on-month basis. There are no coverages for part-time workers.
  2. Individuals often cannot purchase insurances in its full pricing, because they cannot afford it. They may be able to afford smaller payments weekly / daily.
  3. Independent workers such as housekeepers, carpenters, etc. do not see any incentive in buying an insurance paying an annual (or long-term) premiums since the costs are higher when compared with their daily labor wages.
  4. The traditional insurance paperwork, and the time-consuming claim process drive people away.

Today, if an individual or a business wants to employ a contract worker for a few days and insure the worker against any medical events at their place, there is almost no way for it.

Or, if an individual wants to buy an affordable insurance, and wants to make the payments in smaller intervals, there is almost no way for it.

Or, if a low-income individual wants to visit a doctor to get quality healthcare without worrying about medical bills, claims and timelines, there are hardly any way to do it".

What is RapydCare platform?

RapydCare - (RapidCare) - is a digital insurance platform that makes the insurance experience smooth, fast and rewarding.

It is a small-tickets insurance platform for Health and Life insurances. It aims to make insurance more accessible, affordable and faster.

This is a people-first insurance platform. Partner Doctors are part of the system and they can raise the claims as well.

How is RapydCare different?

  1. Small-ticket health / life insurances. Buy small insurances at costs as low as Rs.25 (for comparison, a McDonalds plain veg burger costs Rs.100+) or as low as USD 1 weekly. Renew as necessary.
  2. Ability to pay weekly / daily based on the type of insurances.
  3. The Application takes a flat service fee and hence there is no incentive to reject any claim or for reduced payouts. (This is similar to Lemonade insurance's business model).
  4. Quickly buy an insurance for yourself OR an employee / contractor in case you are a small business - and track it.
  5. Allow the partner doctors to raise a claim easily through the system by sharing the RapydCare Insurance ID so that the low-income patients do not have to worry about bills and claims.
  6. AI/ML based underwriting module decides the risk and price.
  7. No brokers selling the insurances giving us a cost advantage to sell the insurances at affordable prices. All the activities in the claim lifecycle would be automated to reduce the cost of operations.
  8. Decentralized Claim Reviews - with a community of Partner Doctors rather than relying on in-house teams.
  9. Anti-fraud algorithms - (Not available in the demo). (We were building a neo4j based graph database to build anomaly detection module for detecting fraud claims. But could not finish it before the deadline)
  10. Cashback rewards with the unclaimed pool of money . Mass payouts.
  11. Multi-language and Multi-country support.

Example Use Cases

  1. Insure a domestic help (housekeeper) for health / life as an individual employer.
  2. Insure a contract worker such as a plumber / electrician / construction worker during a temporary employment - Use worker compensation insurance.
  3. Insure your small business employees on a weekly basis. This may be a good perk for the employees.
  4. Insure a hired driver as part of a long distance journey.
  5. Insure yourself while you are on an adventure camping / sports activity.
  6. Insure yourself while you are about to undergo a complex medical procedure.
  7. As a hospital, insure your patient while the patient is about to undergo a complex medical procedure.

Our values

  1. We put our emphasis in fast claims. Life Insurance / Health insurance claims mean the claimants went through tough times recently. We want the RapydCare claim to be start of something positive in their lives, and we want it to happen fast.
  2. Automate every process we can with the use of technology. For examples,
    • Compare photo identity document with the user's selfie for confirmation.
    • Read Medical report document images to understand and index the pricing so that they can be sent to anomaly detection algorithms.
    • Send the user's video of raising a claim to AI models for sentiment analysis and emotion analysis to expedite the process.
  3. Let the community run the system - we believe in the system that we are all part of. Letting the community run the reviews minimizes the risk of frauds when there are proper controls in place through broadening the knowledge on practices and standards.

Roles in the system

  1. Individual Users (buyers, nominees) - Any individual user can buy an insurance for self / another as a contractor.
  2. Businesses - Can buy insurances that are designed for businesses - such as small business health insurances, etc.
  3. Partner Doctors - a community of doctors who can review claims, raise claims on behalf of their patients.
  4. Approvers - the ones who approve the claim requests.

Roles

How does the application work?

Individual User - General flow

  1. Any user can register with the application by filling in few information such as date of birth and a social security number. (This will be integrated with automatic verification using AWS Rekognition in future versions).
  2. User after logging in should set up their bank / card information under My Profile so that they can receive automatic claim payouts when they raise any claims / when they get any cashbacks.
  3. If the user is a nominee for another user, then the above step is necessary.
  4. The individual user can share the RapydCare User ID with anyone else who is willing to buy the user an insurance.
  5. The individual user can buy an insurance for self by answering a few health-declaration questions and making a payment.
  6. The individual user can also buy an insurance for another through an available insurance - such as term life insurance for a Contract worker for a few days / medical insurance for a domestic help.
  7. The individual user can raise a claim for self or for others as a nominee.

User Set up

Buy insurance

Buy insurance

Raise a claim

Business User - General flow

  1. Businesses can buy insurances for their employees and decide to renew it in short intervals as necessary.
  2. Business Users also have all the options that are available to an individual user.

Reviewer User - Partner Doctor - general flow

  1. When a claim is raised by a user, the system automatically assigns the claim for review with two Random doctors. They become reviewers of the claim.
  2. Only after both the reviewers approve it, the claim goes to final level for disbursal.
  3. To make the claims faster, the reviewers are chosen from the community of partner doctors, making the review process decentralized.
  4. The reviewer user can either approve or mark a claim "need more info".

Reviewer flow

Below credentials can be used to test Partner Doctor roles. Any claim, when raised gets assigned to two of these three Partner Doctors for review RANDOMLY.

rapydcare.doctor+1@gmail.com Rapyd@123

rapydcare.doctor+2@gmail.com Rapyd@123

rapydcare.doctor+3@gmail.com Rapyd@123

These are RapydCare application credentials for testing reviewer roles.

Approver flow

Approver flow

How are Rapyd APIs used?

  1. Rapyd Checkout - For buying an insurance.
  2. Rapyd Wallet to Wallet transfer - A flat percentage of service fee is moved from the insurance payment in primary account to an internal wallet. The primary account is used as the pool for claims.
  3. Create Beneficiary - Each registered user is required to update their card / bank information through My Profile. The beneficiary information is stored and maintained by Rapyd. This is necessary for a nominee or for any one who is raising a claim. The payouts are made to these accounts when a partner doctor completes a claim review or a claim disbursal happens.
  4. Rapyd Disburse (payout) - Payouts are made to Partner Doctors and Claimants. '
  5. Create Customer - Integrated with backend for using it as part of Rapyd Checkout page creation calls.

Rapyd APIs

How we built it

After discussing on the idea initially towards the hackathon, we went on to study how the insurance space works. We studied several applications and digital platforms - such as Lemonade in US, Acko & Digit in India, and platforms such as insuremo. We discussed with a few industry and technology veterans about Insurance platforms and their challenges.

Our primary focus was on Ease of use and the language. Since we will be dealing with a user base who may not have time to do this and may not understand the industry jargons, we wanted to be as descriptive as possible while designing pages and as optimal as possible in terms of navigation and set up.

Example:

  • Just share the RapydCare User ID to buy someone an insurance. (This ID can be in future shared through a QR code by scanning).
  • Just enter a RapydCare user id and a RapydCare insurance id - to get the claim going. Documents can come later.
  • Just choose a few fields as part of health declarations rather than going through an elaborate process.

Below are the key components / technologies of the architecture

  1. NodeJS / Express - Backend
  2. MongoDB - (Atlas- AWS Cloud) - database
  3. React JS - front end application
  4. Nginx - Reverse Proxy
  5. AWS S3 - for Storage of claim documents / images / identity documents
  6. Rapyd API / platform - the backbone of the payment system
  7. AWS SES - for emailing
  8. Deployment - AWS Lightsail
  9. Python (numpy, pandas, scikitlearn, pickle), Flask - for a prototype ML underwriting service.
  10. Neo4j - Graph database (Aura cloud) - for building anomaly detection system on claims. (NOT part of the current version since we could not finish it before the deadline.)
  11. AWS Rekognition - for ID cards verification with photo, Claim video sentiment analysis, etc. (NOT part of the current version since we could not finish it before the deadline.)

Architecture diagram

Challenges we ran into

  1. Since this is just one of our first few projects in Node JS and React JS (although we worked in other platforms such as .Net) - it was initially difficult to do a few things - such as connecting to aws s3, or designing a document upload functionality, etc.
  2. Understanding the vast functionality / exhaustive features of Rapyd API and standards across different countries and currencies through the documentation. But once we got the hang of it, it was easier.
  3. Designing an underwriting / pricing module with Python because of lack of data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is an application built for a purpose. Building an application with a purpose to make people's lives easier always gives joy and meaning to the work that we do.

What we learned

  1. Rapyd APIs and how the financial payment APIs work in general. This was very valuable.
  2. NodeJS with documents and images handling.
  3. Insurance Process design and trends that are developing.

What's next for RapydCare - digital health insurance

  1. Design the Anti-fraud algorithms that can be plugged into Claim Process
  2. Claim Submission to include a 1 minute video from the claimant.
  3. Buying Insurance to include a selfie / back-cam picture of the policy holder.
  4. Building a graph database of all entities to study patterns in the claim.
  5. Reading the content of medical report images through OCR and running an anomaly detection algorithm over it for raising red flags.
  6. QR code to share the RapydCare User ID / Insurance ID rather than sharing the long string ID.
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Updates

posted an update —

Here are the steps to test this application at the given URL - http://rapydcare.com

  1. Register as a new user. Note the RapydCare user ID under my profile screen.
  2. Choose the country in any of the pages where the country selector is available.
  3. For a proper and successful payment completion redirection by Rapyd, use India as the country. For US, the payment completion action redirects to rapyd.net by default in Sandbox.
  4. Buy insurances and test the flow for self. Upon successful payment a flat fee is collected into a wallet as service fee.
  5. Create another user ID and note the RapydCare user ID under my profile screen.
  6. Visit my profile in both IDs and set bank or card beneficiary. This will be used during claim disbursals. For a successful claim processing in Sandbox, please choose US as the country in country selector before setting the beneficiaries in my profile. Country India option doesn't work well with Sandbox payouts.
  7. Use both of these user IDs to play the contractor and employee roles and buy relevant insurances.
  8. Use the mentioned partner doctor credentials above for review roles. On successful reviews, a fee is credited to their bank accounts / cards through Rapyd Disburse API.
  9. As part of Approver role, when the approver approves, a claim disbursal is processed through Rapyd Disburse API.

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