Our offices in Parnell are co-located with a great company you probably haven’t heard of – Konnect. Their success has been based, not so much on inventing ground-breaking technology, but by solving a really painful problem for the insurance industry and for every GP.
If you have ever applied for a life insurance policy, your insurance company will have sent you off to the doctor to get a medical report. The forms that the insurance companies use are long, all different to each other, are painful to fill out and most of the questions aren’t relevant for most applicants. Doctors think that the process of filling in the forms interferes with their job (of looking after sick people). Insurers have trouble getting them back from doctors and when they do, must manually enter all of the information into their own systems.
Many of the insurers tried to create an online system to streamline the process, improve the quality of data and increase the number of policies that they were writing. But a doctor doesn’t want to have to install a new system for every insurance company – a doctor may only do a few reports a month and there is only a limited amount of space on a desktop…
Enter Konnect – they have assembled a team that understands both the insurance industry’s processes and the practice management systems used by doctors. They set about designing a system called SureMed that has become an industry standard platform within 12 months of launch.
It’s not often you come across a win-win-win like Konnect has delivered with SureMed:
- Doctors can now complete the forms within a few minutes (because much of the data is automatically populated from their existing databases) and they get paid every week;
- Insurers have cut the amounts that they were paying doctors and are getting the information much more quickly, the data is reliable and requires no double handling when they receive it; and
- There’s still money left over for Konnect to employ 30 people and invest in even more great products and services.
Last Friday night Konnect was a winner at the 2011 NZ Hi-Tech Awards. The category was the HiFX Innovative Hi-Tech Services Product Award. Here’s what the judges had to say:
Konnect has solved a problem previously seen as too hard to be fixed by automation given the number of different stake holders and complexity in handling insurer requests. The judges were impressed with Konnect’s speed to market, distribution strategy and uniqueness. It has successfully solved a problem for the insurance industry as well as the notoriously difficult private health sector. They have secured a dominant position in NZ and are confident of cracking the Australian market in a big way. Other countries beckon.
We are delighted to see the team at Konnect getting the recognition that they deserve. Konnect isn’t resting on its laurels – they are making some real waves in Australia and have big plans for new services and territories. And a final word – Konnect’s success has been funded by its customers and shareholders exclusively – showing that you don’t need government money when you’ve got such a compelling business model.
