Ruhsan Topçu, General Manager of IMECE Destek Danışmanlık, gave a statement to answer the questions about the company’s history and services. According to her statements, İMECE works with a very young and dynamic team that is flexible, innovative, creative, and capable of designing and developing all kinds of products to address requirements. They can, therefore, design creative products that will shape the market; and are currently providing assistance services to 8 different insurance companies approximately 500 thousand health insurance policyholders.

Reminding that İMECE Destek Danışmanlık was founded by Muhittin Yurt in 2014, Ruhsan Topçu continued her statement as follows:

“İMECE Destek is a company that is open to innovation and prefers to make a difference rather than maintaining the as-is. Extensive know-how and experience of our founder Muhittin Yurt in the insurance business make a great contribution to this approach. Our group is also open to innovation on the hospital front; so, combining two innovative units that want to make a difference, naturally yields good results. Via our own software, we can provide support to insurance companies in many areas including provision processes, risk acceptance assessments, and tariff determination. We have a portfolio of 590 contracted medical institutions for complementary health insurance and 1.200 contracted medical institutions for private health insurance. We are structured as three different departments: Contracted Institution Management, which is run by Assistant General Manager Halit Başkaya, who is a healthcare manager and works in the insurance market for long years. Serap Teksöz is the Assistant General Manager of Business Development, which acts as a kitchen that prepares all our products. We have been working with Serap Teksöz for long years. And of course, Operations is our most important department. Deniz Yazıcı is an experienced name in the market and manages our operations as the Assistant General Manager. We prepare tailor-made solutions for requirements within this structure, create our own network and run our business on our own software platform. We are a team that will break the mould of traditional health insurance market. We have a strong infrastructure and powerful partnerships to achieve that. Everyone will soon see that there are no uninsurable health risks: As long as the coverage, premium and service-provider are determined accurately, every risk can be included in the scope of health insurance.”

We derive our inspiration of products from the field

Ruhsan Topçu also shared details about their project called “Sağlığın Bizde / We got Your Health”, underlining that they derive their inspiration from the field while designing an insurance product.

“Insurance business is built on ‘risk’ and the duty of insurance companies is to insure potential risks, not realized ones. However, we are changing this notion,” she said.

“Private health insurance has a certain limited position in the market. It addresses a restricted group of customers with high costs. Therefore, it is unlikely to become popular in our society. I am not complaining about the rates of premiums. I believe that premiums are reasonable considering the services provided in exchange for the payments. However, this service is not accessible by everyone. Medical Park Health Group has a contract with Social Security Institution and is widely known for it. Most of their patients have health coverage from the SSI. These people also pay out of their own pockets, and can experience difficulties while doing so. As a doctor who worked in the hospital, and also as a human; I do not like people’s health to become a matter of bargaining. This imposes a negative impact on the management of our group. Medical economy is very strange, supply and demand work very differently here. The requirement is not determined by the demander but by the supplier, which can become seriously dangerous. We had to provide a solution on that side. Most people generally have previous health conditions, which used to be a problem while buying health insurance. We have overcome this problem to a certain degree thanks to the complementary health insurance, and it has become very popular in a very short time.”

“Now, complementary health insurance competes with private health insurance. In the past, private health insurance policies could not be turned into complementary health insurance policies. Only people who had not bought a private health insurance were able to buy complementary health insurance, which was among out most important targets for the beginning. In that sense, I consider complementary health insurance as a very successful product; however, it has created some unhappy policyholders due to lack of certain types of coverage. Some people cannot be insured due to their existing medical conditions or their ages. But, in our society, young people generally do not have much money. People start having more money after a certain age. And when you have money and desire to buy health insurance, it is generally too late. Complementary health insurance is supported by the Social Security Institute. But, as a hospital group, we started thinking about how much more we can shoulder and how much we can minimize the bargaining part of health insurance, which resulted in the project called ‘Sağlığın Bize / We Got Your Health’. People could not believe us in the beginning. Our agents asked us the same questions over and over. Some people bought it just to try. But I believed that in 4-5 years, we have built the trust and people have understood that everything is compensated. We only have one restriction at the moment: a waiting period of 3 months. In the first 3 months, only outpatient treatment costs of our policyholders are covered; after 3 months all manner of medical problems are covered within the policy limits. Let’s assume that you have cancer and need treatment, and decided to buy this policy. All diagnostic costs are covered by this policy, apart from any needed operations. You need to wait for 3 months for your policy to cover for your operation costs. We can insure everyone until the age of 80. But our policies can be renewed for existing policyholders after they are 80.”