In Germany, around 9 million people have full private health insurance. In addition, more than 20 million Germans have supplementary insurance, e.g. for outpatient care or dental treatment. Despite the advantages of being a member of a private insurance company, such as finding an appointment with a doctor quickly or receiving treatment from a chief physician, most privately insured people suffer from the still cumbersome process of submitting their costs. This has been confirmed to us at hi.health for 3 years in weekly customer interviews.

Our co-founder Fredrik Debong also knows this problem. As a type 1 diabetic and father of three children, a number of bills accumulate each year, which must first be laid out and are often only reimbursed on a pro-rata basis after a few days, and often without clear justification. As a successful startup entrepreneur in the field of digital health (more on that here), he has long wondered how it is possible that privately insured people are put in the way of these unnecessary hurdles. It could all be so much easier.

What has been common practice in banking for a few years now, online banking and payment with a virtual card, “must also be possible in combination with my insurance or reimbursement,” he thought to himself. Together with Sebastian Gruber, a university friend who had already gained insight into entrenched customer group structures through his work as a management consultant for several years, he founded hi.health.

With hi.health’s foundation, Fredrik and Sebastian set themselves the goal of eliminating bureaucratic and, above all, unnecessary artificial hurdles in the healthcare system. Since 2019, we at hi.health have been working with about twenty people, a mix of experts in web and app development, designers, sales people and marketing specialists to make life easier for privately insured people.

How we want to make your life easier – now and in the future

In early 2020, we proudly launched our first version of the hi.health health app. Since then, we’ve already successfully submitted over 100,000 documents for our hi members! By the way, data protection and security of your data are very important to us, so one of our first goals was to get us and our secure processes also certified by TÜV SÜD. You can also learn more about what exactly happens to your data here. We also want to guarantee that you always have a personal contact person in our team. We call this contact person who helps you with your submissions your personal concierge. In the current case, these are Wilma, Ole and Julia. All three of them work for us part-time and form a joint team to assist our now more than 30,000 customers on a daily basis. You are welcome to get a picture of all our employees here.

If you’re wondering if that’s it for now, “So just an app that I can use to submit, how is that different from my insurance?” Then we have the answer for you right here: We want to be much more than your submission app, of course. That’s because we’ve been working on a new product since last year – hi.direkteinreichung. This allows our customers to pay in online stores or mail-order pharmacies and submit the costs directly to their private health insurance when placing the order.
Exactly how this works depends a bit on the online store, but here you can take a look at how it might look.

You can find out where you can use this new payment method here. We are currently working on making it possible for you to select this new service at large mail-order pharmacies or at your Go-To online store. So if you already use the hi.health app, you can log in to us directly with your account and view the invoice in your app overview after submission. This keeps everything nicely documented in one place.

Our goal is to eliminate any bureaucratic hurdles for you as a privately insured person. Like a paypal plus automatic submission of your charges – private health insurance in simple.

Since we want to develop this app and our services for you, you help decide where the journey goes. Do you feel like having a say in the future and want to help us better understand what else we can improve for you?
Then sign up directly for a customer interview via the following link:
https://calendly.com/hi-health/hi-health-gespraech

Now we’re looking forward to helping you submit your charges from now on. Because we are always on your side.