Alphabet’s Verily has announced plans to launch Coefficient, a health insurance subsidiary that will eventually leverage Verily’s various technologies and health-related devices. The insurance subsidiary will be backed by Swiss Re Group’s Swiss Re Corporate Solutions commercial insurance unit. According to Verily, its Coefficient will, among other things, offer ‘novel insurance and payment models.’
Verily Life Sciences is a health-centric business owned by Alphabet. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company said that it is launching its Coefficient insurance subsidiary to offer stop-loss insurance for employers, meaning they’ll get reimbursed for money spent toward employee health claims beyond a certain pre-determined amount.
Coefficient will, according to Verily, offer a ‘data-driven model that is unique in the traditional employer stop-loss market.’ The precision risk data-driven solution will take advantage of Verily’s data science, as well as its hardware and software products, to offer customers what the company says is ‘more predictable benefit plan protection.’
The insurance underwriting engine will be analytics-based to determine areas that may have unexpected cost volatility, Verily says, with plans to offer ‘more dynamic and precise insurance policy provisions’ that will cover those instances. The addition of Verily’s products as factors in this will be integrated ‘over time.’
Verily CEO Andy Conrad said in a statement:
Employers have been facing rising and increasingly unpredictable healthcare costs for years. Coefficient is aimed at reducing blind spots and providing greater cost control mechanisms for self-funded employers, and we expect that partnering with Swiss Re Corporate Solutions will help us to better develop and distribute our precision risk solution to the employer stop-loss market.
Over time, we look forward to integrating Coefficient with Verily’s employer health solutions, including mobile health devices and innovative care management programs, in order to align payment models with better health outcomes.