New policy covers risks faced by Asia-based digital health services

With the impact of COVID-19 accelerating the uptake of digital health services, Beazley has introduced a modular insurance policy called 'Virtual Care' in Asia to provide coverage for risks associated with such services.

According to Beazley global head of miscellaneous medical and life sciences Evan Smith, the adoption of digital health services comes with a wide range of interconnected risks that are distinct from traditional healthcare exposures, such as data privacy and security concerns as well as technology failure.

Virtual Care seeks to address the complexity of these risks by offering a single policy for healthcare and tech providers. Previously, firms would have to purchase individual policies for each risk class.

However, the new policy offers four pillars of cover to ensure health and technology policyholders are not left with unexpected gaps in coverage. These include:

• Medical malpractice and professional indemnity is included as standard and covers bodily injury to any patient caused by a negligent act, accident or cyber incident
• Tech and media liability covers technology platforms or products such as computer or telecommunications hardware or software, or related electronic products, against failure
• Public and products liability provides full coverage for accidents resulting in bodily injury and property damage caused by products, including tech products such as wearables and self-monitoring healthcare devices
• Cyber cover protects against a broad range of cyber threats, including business interruption; cyber extortion and data recovery loss; data and network liability.

The speciality insurer also provides optional extensions catering to various business needs including mitigation costs, medical regulatory costs, claims due to loss of documents and reputational damage costs.

Virtual Care is available to a wide range of organisations in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The policy could cover:

• Telehealth services, which enable remote healthcare and pharmacy services by professionals
• mHealth, which uses mobile technology including apps and wearable devices for self-monitoring and management
• IT platforms and software used by healthcare stakeholders in health management

Virtual Care was previously launched in North America, the UK and Spain.

Source: Asia Insurance Review