Meet Dr Karan Mehta, CEO at Bluezone Insurance: An Insurtech Reinventing Life Insurance For People With Chronic Illnesses

Bluezone is a team of doctors, AI and behavioural scientists looking to make life healthier and fairer for each person living with chronic disease. Life insurance is our business – and we’re doing that business differently.

Every single policy will be built differently. Because every person is built differently. We’re offering policies for the person, not the condition. Which means we’ll offer a fully personalised, precise plan, along with offering insights and support to consistently improve health.

We have taken a first principles approach to developing the most powerful medical underwriting risk engine using sophisticated AI/ML techniques and large medical datasets as part of my PhD research. This will offer customers cheaper and fairer premium prices and a digital and streamlined onboarding process. We will also refer our customers to a health/wellbeing marketplace of lifestyle apps that will help these customers lead healthier lifestyles and de-risk them

It is insurance made fairer, for futures made healthier.

  • We are aiming to provide same day life insurance approval for anyone living with type 2 diabetes:
    • No medicals – just a simple questionnaire
    • 100% online application
    • The whole process only takes about 10 minutes – or within a matter of days if they need to do some home testing
  • For cases that are currently referred to medical underwriting or who have been previously declined, we are able to provide same-day cover which is significantly quicker than the alternatives which take on average 3 months to offer cover.
  • We are also able to offer cover to a proportion of individuals that have been declined by others.

Bluezone | Insurtech Gateway Portfolio

How did you come up with the idea for the company? 

My time as a doctor working in clinical medicine led me to embark on a journey to develop a scalable and proactive solution that could potentially help millions of individuals and hopefully result in alleviating some of the pressure we’re facing in healthcare systems.

While learning about the insurance industry, my Type 2 Diabetic uncle explained the problems he faced when trying to buy life insurance. He was rejected several times, premiums were expensive, the application process was long and cumbersome. Individuals with other chronic illnesses such as heart disease experience similar issues. As the prevalence of chronic illnesses is significantly increasing, this segment of the population needs to be better served.

This thesis drew me to the insurance industry and the launch of Bluezone as (re)insurers are experts at risk estimation through the process of underwriting. Further, the industry is uniquely positioned to improve the health of their customers due to the underlying shared value business model.

How has the company evolved since you have launched?

As a start-up we have been developing the proposition over the last 12 months and have secured an initial round of funding to help us develop our unique solution with the aim of launching our first insurance product in Q4.

We have also developed our risk engine (PURE) through the application of deep learning survival models on large electronic health care datasets.

Our new AI based tech allows us to:

  • Generate precise loadings
  • Use exact risk factor values
  • Understand the complex relationships between individual health variables
  • Output highly accurate/precise personalised loadings instantaneously
  • Identified new risk factors / underwriting questions that improve the accuracy of underwriting

 

What can we hope to see from Bluezone in the future?

We believe in building sustainable habits for the long term by taking a slow, deliberate and methodical approach to help you realise your ideal future version. We don’t believe in an intense lifestyle that makes you feel miserable and stressed. We prefer consistency over intensity and the power of compounding one’s health.

With this philosophy we intend to improve the lives of those with chronic diseases by offering life insurance that empowers customers to live healthier lives.

We are launching our T2D life insurance product in the UK later this year and customers are able to sign up to the waitlist now.

Once live, customers will be able to acquire cover directly via our website – or via specialist insurers, brokers and price comparison websites

 

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