Managed Care Services

Munich Re recognized very early on the importance of risk management and therefore entered into cooperation in 1990 with MedNet, an international group of managed care service companies, to further develop its health reinsurance business.

In 1997 MedNet was taken over by Munich Re and thus became an integral part of the Health Division's overall strategy. In this way, Munich Re added a further dimension (administration) to its core competencies of product design, tariff calculation/pricing and risk selection. In doing so, it linked up all of the key factors of a successful health (re)insurance product.

Therefore, Munich Re has become, as it were, a system provider of healthcare management services, offering a flexible range of service modules to meet different needs depending on market and business strategy.

By adopting this approach, Munich Re is pursuing the strategic objective of successfully positioning itself as a long-term partner of health insurers. It brings together as many functions as possible of the value-added chain of a primary insurer and supports these substantially.

Managed care

The objective of managed care is to control the costs of medical care using coordinated methods and tools (e.g. by avoiding unnecessary treatments and reducing abuse) and at the same time to allow insureds access to first-rate medical care.

In terms of operative implementation, the following functions in particular are responsible for successful cost and quality management:

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  It is essentially the job of Medical Management to check whether treatment is necessary from a medical point of view, to identify medical drivers of cost and, by managing these, to ensure that efficient and top-quality medical care is provided.
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  Network Management ensures that doctors, hospitals, chemists and other service providers are linked together in networks and offered as such to policyholders depending on the product required.
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  Operations Management is responsible for the efficient administration of products (registration of insureds, claims handling, payment of service providers).

A system infrastructure and professional data management (analyses, statistics, trend calculations) are necessary if the above-mentioned functions are to work successfully.

Innovative solutions in healthcare

With MedNet Munich Re has taken a proactive approach to offering innovative solutions for the design of international healthcare provision systems, i.e. by making available high-quality and reasonably priced healthcare.

The aim of Munich Re is to position itself successfully also in the area of health reinsurance and its risk management in order to be competitive internationally.