University of Twente Student Theses
The role of mobile health applications for health insurance companies in Germany
Schade, Leah (2017) The role of mobile health applications for health insurance companies in Germany.
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| Abstract: | Recent years have noted the increasing prevalence of smartphones and an expansion of their user base across all age ranges. A growing amount of health-related mobile applications is flooding the application market and the digitization of the health sector processes rapidly with digital offerings becoming more and more popular. At the same time health insurance companies are facing tremendous difficulties such as increased costs through chronic diseases and an overall aging population. This thesis investigates how mobile health applications can create business development in terms of business model innovation/ customer value creation for German health insurance companies. Firstly, a literature review is conducted to gather relevant important information and to build a theoretical background on the concepts of mobile health applications, big data, the business model concept and app-enabled business value creation. The literature review has also shed light on three possible outcomes of health application provision for health insurance companies, in particular cost reductions, customer retention and new customer acquisition. In order to filter out the role of health applications for German health insurance companies, knowledgable employees of health insurance companies are asked to participate in a self-administered online survey around health application offering of their company. As the research topic is quite recent the main goal of the research is to find an underlying construct within the data to prove correlation between the constructs. The results of the online survey are thus analyzed using an exploratory factor analysis and are then evaluated descriptively. Four factors were build using common factor analysis which cover the aspects of customer retention, targeted customer offering, big data possibilities as well as app use. Based on the findings a model is created that shows the underlying business value of mobile health applications. The overall finding of this thesis is that there are correlations between health applications and three main factors. Firstly, health apps can possibly influence customer retention and customer relationships. Second, health apps hold an underlying potential of aiding in the prevention of widespread diseases, early detection of diseases, treatment of diseases and offering targeted customer offers. And thirdly, there are big data possibilities such as detecting trends about the collectivity of insurants and the provision of targeted offers based on customer knowledge. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/73504 |
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