Need-based and optimized health insurance package using clustering algorithm

Abstract

The paper presents a novel methodology based on machine learning to optimize medical benefits in healthcare settings, i.e., corporate, private, public or statutory. The optimization is applied to design healthcare insurance packages based on the employee healthcare record. Moreover, with the advancement in the insurance industry, it is rapidly adapting mathematical and machine learning models to enhance insurance services like funds prediction, customer management and get better revenue from their businesses. However, conventional computing insurance packages and premium methods are time-consuming, designation specific, and not cost-effective. During the design of insurance packages, an employee’s needs should be given more importance than his/her designation or position in an organization. The design of insurance packages in healthcare is a non-trivial task due to the employees’ changing healthcare needs; therefore, using the proposed technique employees can be moved from their existing package to another depending upon his/her need. This provides the motivation to propose a methodology in which we applied machine learning concepts for designing need-based health insurance packages rather than professional tagging. By the design of need-based packages, medical benefit optimization which is the core goal of our proposed methodology is effectively achieved. Our proposed methodology derives insurance packages that are need-based and optimal based on our defined criteria. We achieved this by first applying the clustering technique to historical medical records. Subsequently, medical benefit optimization is achieved from these packages by applying a probability distribution model on five years employees’ insurance records. The designed technique is validated on real employees’ insurance records from a large enterprise.The proposed design provides 25% optimization on medical benefit amount compared to current medical benefits amount therefore, gives better healthcare to all the employees.