EASTERN Europe is a new frontier for private medical care, and insurers and tech startups are racing to steal a march on their rivals by harnessing the region’s health data.

Growing numbers of people in Eastern European states, from Hungary and Poland to Romania, are turning to private health. The shift is being driven by rising wages, coupled with low public health spending which has often led to staff shortages and long waiting times for tests and surgery.

Now big insurance players in the region, including PZU, Generali, Vienna Insurance Group (VIG) and Allianz, are looking to gather and analyze patient data from the fast-growing market to improve risk assessments and pricing.

“Data is the foundation of the future,” said Gabriella Almassy, general manager of VIG’s Hungarian division, adding that data would be key to identifying where profits can me made in the region’s increasingly competitive health insurance market.

To that end, many insurers are teaming up with technology companies such as Polish startup Infermedica, whose software analyzes anonymized health information to provide preliminary diagnoses.

“We are seeing a health data boom that resembles the financial data boom from 10 to 15 years ago when the banking sector changed a lot,” said Maciej Malenda, head of partnerships at Infermedica, which works with PZU and Allianz.

“Calling it a gold rush is perfectly accurate.”

PZU, the region’s biggest insurer, said it was also looking into dozens of other startups to help it expand its health business.

Health data is an increasingly coveted prize for insurers and technology companies globally.

The trend was illustrated by Google’s plans to buy fitness-tracker maker Fitbit for US$2.1 billion, announced late last year. The deal will bring the web giant a rich trove of data gathered by millions of Fitbit devices, which monitor users’ daily steps, calories burned, heart rate and sleep quality, among other things.

The fledgling nature of the Eastern European private health-care market presents rare opportunities, due to low market saturation compared with more mature Western markets, combined with rising consumer spending power.

(SD-Agencies)