HIP New System for Medical Aids from 2CANA

For busy people with stressful lifestyles, dealing with medical aids can be extremely time consuming and frustrating. Durban-based 2CANA, a company with extensive experience in providing IT services to the financial services industry (medical aid and insu

Known as HIP, which stands for Health Information Platform, this new system uses state-of-the-art technology to simplify a process that has, up until now, caused enough stress to run up one’s medical bills, explains 2CANA’s Business Development Manager, Charles Cowan.

More and more companies are now using new age smart technology. 2CANA examined the peculiarities and problems of current medical aid’s systems and created one that not only eliminated many of their short comings but was compatible with smart phones, laptops and tablets.

“Through HIP, consumers can be empowered and involved in their medical insurance.
Our system has been designed to be intuitive and user friendly so the man in the street can understand it and connect with his medical aid. If your medical aid uses this software, you will be able to go onto the system with your ipad, smart phone or computer and click on your membership account and follow the information flow. For example from a payment to the claim/invoice submission, to the claims advice statement to viewing the benefits utilised, related queries and so on. If, for example, they have paid you a portion of your claim, you will be able to see why they have not paid the entire account. If you want to interact with your medical aid, you can click and send a query and track its progress in the app without having to wait hours and hours for telephones to be answered,” says Cowan.

“The new business process has also been modernised, enabling self-service through excel – the application all financial managers are most comfortable with. If your company wants to consider a new medical plan, you can import your staff records onto an excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet interacts with the server to calculate costs. You can tweak it to suit all parties – more of this and less of that – and, when you are happy accepting the quote will activate the membership and each staff member can then be automatically sent a welcome pack with further details.”

Cowan says this is a solution that has been tailored to the needs of the South African medical aid sector where dominant big players call the tune and there are limited independent solutions available.

“HIP not only operates off a web browser, ipad or smart phone but does not need a sophisticated or expensive mainframe. It is built with Oracle technology and is platform independent,can run on Linux or Windows and can run on a small server or in a clustered environment and can also be deployed in the cloud,” he explains.

The new HIP application also does away with long delays when it comes to installing and phasing in new systems. It is a next-generation, configurable and rules-based solution, which shortens both implementation and go-to market cycles for new products.

The development of HIP stems from the considerable experience of the team at 2CANA. Project leader Cowan’s career as a solution architect and business analyst includes working on systems for big names in the medical aid sector, government departments and non-government organisations in southern Africa and managing director Dave Carson has a PhD in computer science.

Opened in 2003, 2CANA grew from the management of systems forNational Medical Plan – which has since become Momentum. Although the company continues with this, it has diversified and now caters for other big brands and smaller clients.

Cowan says they built the prototype for this system six yearsago for HIV/AIDS management as part of a public/private sector partnership in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the government of Botswana to meet the need for a logistics system to manage the patient history and records.

“Our next project was for the Namibian Road Accident Fund which needed to manage the records for all the medical cases. Following this, Momentum selected the system that they rolled out in nine African countries. We customised the system significantly to meet Momentum’s own specific requirements and strategic objectives. The HIP system is also used to administer the medical aids for World Vision and Momentum in Malawi.” Cowan says.