HealthStream nabs nib as first customer

Health fund nib has outsourced the data capture involved in routine claims and policy administration to speed up claim processing times.

The fund today signed a five-year contract with HealthStream, a consortium of Salmat, Civica and Dataract.

iTnews understood the deal was to be the first commercial rollout of the HealthStream service.

It would automate and manage more than 600,000 paper transactions a year on a pay-per-transaction model, nib said in a statement.

It would reduce the costs of routine claims processing and policy administration by an average of 30 percent over the next two years, said nib chief executive officer Mark Fitzgibbon.

It was unclear whether this reduction would be reflected in lower private health insurance fees.

nib said it would allow employees "to focus on assessing claims and value add activities for customers versus data capture".

"The change will also lead to savings in operational costs through the reduction of manual handing of high volume, low complexity and low monetary-value transactions," Fitzgibbon said.