MUMBAI: PB Fintech, the parent company of Policybazaar, will invest around Rs 860 crore for a 25% stake in PB Healthcare, which will set up hospitals with a capacity of 1,000 beds in the first year to provide captive services to buyers of policies with managed healthcare. The objective of the company is to ensure treatment without pre-authorisation, zero rejections, and fully cashless treatment.
Speaking to TOI, Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and CEO of PB Fintech, said affordability is going to be a big challenge going forward as the cost of healthcare will rise in future due to new technologies like robotic surgery and the corporatisation of hospitals.
“The way to solve this problem is for the insurance companies to have their own partnership. Today, when a company has 14,000 network partners, it cannot control their behaviour,” said Dahiya.
Initially, the hospitals would be set up around NCR and later rolled out to other centres. PB Healthcare is attempting the model of Kaiser Permanente from the US, which operates as an integrated managed care consortium, blending the functions of a healthcare provider and an insurance company. This is similar to the approach taken by Dr. Devi Shetty’s Narayana Health Insurance. However, unlike Narayana, which issues policies on its own books, PB Healthcare will serve customers of other companies.
The PB Healthcare model would include a layer of general practitioners who would not receive any referral fee.
