How would you like a self-service claims portal that uses facial recognition to process your claims in under two minutes or to play a game that helps you navigate your way through our health system?
These were some of the ideas explored by 99 hackers, 45 volunteers and 22 subject matter experts who came together for Medibank’s inaugural Hack for Health.
We wanted to give our people the unconstrained freedom to develop ideas to solve for the problems and opportunities that they see. As hosts Mark Brownfield and Jodie Granger explained to the teams, health was long due some bigger, more progressive, creative and disruptive thinking, and they had come together as a group for two days to unlock their energy and creativity to get the ideas flowing.
From 87 initial suggestions, 13 ideas were selected; ranging from streamlining claims processes across Medicare and Medibank, a personalised healthcare program based on data from wearables, an app to help you track and manage your health check-ups, and ways to get people more active in the workplace.
Teams were formed to help bring the ideas to life, supported by access to data and subject matter experts from across the business who the hackers were able to call upon for advice. The hack culminated in a marketplace event where all employees heard from and voted on their favourite idea, before the teams made their final pitch to the judging panel.
It was a self-service claims portal idea that wowed the judges and employees - the team built a prototype designed to let customers make a claim in under two minutes using a look (photo ID), scan and claim approach. The team won both the Hack for Health and People’s Choice awards and their idea will now progress through to the next stage. We’re also looking at how we can support a number of the other ideas.
This Hack for Health was all about giving people the opportunity to take part, no matter what their area of expertise, and encouraging them to think creatively about putting our customers and their health at the centre of our decisions. It gave people the chance to learn new skills like ideation and pitching, collaborate with others from across the business and have fun doing it.
I’d like to thank everyone who participated for really getting behind the initial ideas and building them out into strong concepts. Our Hack for Health was such a success, we’re already planning our next one.