How Nigeria’s Henry Ifeanyi is Tackling Fraud in Healthcare Insurance through Curacel
Henry Ifeanyi Mascot founded Curacel in 2017, a Nigerian startup that aims to fast track claims processing and detects fraudulent claims for health insurance companies in Africa.
He and his team wanted things to move fast, but they had to learn that technology diffusion takes time in the health industry and that the healthcare industry is very conservative when it comes to the adoption of technology. Hence, they had to thread with patience.
Curacel provides a claims automation engine for health insurers to streamline and automate claims processes.
The solution reduces claims’ cycle time from months to days, reduces claims’ processing cost up to 75%, and improves the provider’s claims experience with artificial intelligence (AI assisted clinical vetting), which can integrate with legacy systems.
Curacel Systems (Nigeria) is the first health claims switch in Nigeria. Powered by an AI fraud detection solution that increases the efficiency of processing claims, it digitalises claims at hospitals and sends them directly to the health insurer. Curacel saves companies up to 15% of erroneous and fraudulent claims.
Getting collaborators to believe in the Curacel dream was quite difficult, Henry said “The biggest struggle was getting to the first revenue. It took such a long time. I wanted to have reasonable traction before I went to raise funds. During that period of bootstrapping, it was really tough to get collaborators who were going to create massive value without pay.”
According to him “We launched our first product for hospitals two years ago in 2017. We started because we wanted to use the technology that was available to help health insurers. We provide claims automation and fraud detection for health insurance companies or medical schemes.”
He also believes that his greatest achievement as an entrepreneur is building a product that has become the operating system when it comes to claims processing for his clients.
It is Henry’s lifelong dream to be the operating system for insurance claims processing and fraud detection across Africa and having a presence in at least 10 African countries.
