Corporate health as a product
Last reviewed
A hospital corporate health programme is renewed on utilisation, camp experience and a dashboard the HR head can show her CFO, not on the package list a sales team pitched. The article treats the employee journey, the onsite camp and account management as product decisions, with the ethical boundary on employer reporting made explicit.
A corporate account is won by a sales team and lost by everyone else. The contract is signed on price and a services list. The renewal is decided eleven months later by an HR head who remembers three things: whether the camp on the office floor was a mess, whether employees complained about waiting for reports, and whether she had anything to show her CFO when he asked what the health budget bought. None of those three is in the contract. All of them are the product.
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Most hospital groups run corporate health as a sales function with a discount attached. A team calls HR departments, offers health-check packages and onsite camps at a rate below the walk-in tariff, signs an annual agreement and moves on to the next company. The delivery is handed to the unit’s preventive-health department, the reporting is a spreadsheet emailed when someone asks, and the account is next looked at when the renewal notice is due. Renewal rates in that model are what you would expect.
I came to corporate health from the digital side, looking for the journeys that produced the most patients per rupee, and it was obvious within a quarter that this was a product problem wearing a sales costume. The employee journey, the HR dashboard and the account-management system are the product. The contract is the packaging.
What the HR head actually renews
Sit with a few HR heads at renewal and ask them what they are deciding on. It is rarely price, unless the gap is large. It is, in roughly this order: whether the experience embarrassed them in front of employees; whether the vendor was easy to deal with when something went wrong; whether the reporting gave them a story for their leadership; and whether the employees used it at all.
That last one is the quiet killer. A health-check entitlement that a third of employees use is, to the HR head, a budget line that is two-thirds wasted, and she will be asked about it. Utilisation is the number she is measured on, and most hospital groups never report it to her, because they do not track it themselves. They know how many checks were done. They do not know how many employees were eligible, how many booked and did not come, and how many never engaged.
Build the product around those four concerns and the renewal conversation changes. Build it around the package list and you are competing on price with every diagnostic chain in the city.
Why is the onsite camp the brand walking into the office?
An onsite camp is the only time most employees will meet your brand before they need a hospital. It is also the easiest thing to do badly. A camp with too few phlebotomists, a queue that spills into the corridor, a registration desk working from a printout and a sample that is mislabelled because the employee’s name was spelt three ways is remembered for years. The HR head who organised it is remembered along with it.
The fixes are product fixes, not operations fixes. Pre-registration by link before the camp, so that the desk is verifying rather than typing. Slot booking, so that the queue is spread across the day and the employee knows when to come down. A single identifier per employee that follows the sample to the lab and the report back to the app. A message the evening before with the fasting instruction, because half the value of a camp is lost when people arrive having eaten. A dashboard the HR coordinator can see during the day showing who has registered and who has been seen.
Every one of those items reduces the number of things that can go wrong on the floor. I have watched a camp with the same clinical staff run beautifully at one company and badly at another, and the only difference was whether the digital preparation had been done. The staff were fine. The product was missing.
What happens in the health-check journey after the sample?
The employee’s memory of the health check is formed after the blood is drawn, not before. Did the report arrive when promised? Was it readable, or was it three pages of values with reference ranges and nothing else? Did anyone tell them what to do about the flagged item? Could they book a consultation with a doctor at your hospital from the report, or did they have to start from the beginning as a stranger?
This is where the commercial logic of corporate health lives. A health check is a low-margin service. The reason a hospital group does it is the journey that follows: the employee with a flagged result who consults a specialist, brings a parent for the same check, and chooses your hospital when the family needs one, because their name is already in the system and their reports are already in the app. If the journey ends at the PDF, none of that happens and you have run a diagnostic business at a discount.
The product decisions that matter: the report lands in the group’s app or patient portal, not only in email; flagged results carry a plain-language explanation and a next step; a consultation with the relevant speciality can be booked in two taps at the unit nearest the employee; and the CRM records the flag and follows up, gently, if no booking is made within a few weeks. The ethics here are strict and I return to them below. Within them, this follow-up is the single highest-converting journey in the group, because the patient has a reason, a report and a relationship before the first appointment.
Employee experience is the renewal survey
HR heads do not run formal satisfaction surveys on health vendors. They run informal ones every day, by listening. An employee who waited an hour at the hospital for a pre-booked check, or was asked for a corporate authorisation letter the company had already sent, or received someone else’s report, tells the HR coordinator. Enough of those and the renewal is decided before the meeting.
The operator’s job is to see those failures before HR does. That means a feedback prompt at the end of every corporate journey, a queue in the CRM for every complaint tagged to the account, and a rule that the account manager hears about a corporate complaint the same day. It also means designing the walk-in experience for corporate employees as a separate flow: a desk that recognises the corporate identifier, a pre-authorised list so nobody is asked for a letter, and a promised turnaround for reports that is actually met. The corporate patient is the most likely patient in the hospital to have an opinion and someone to give it to.
What does the corporate client show her CFO?
Ask the HR head what she needs to present internally, and build exactly that. It is usually one page. Employees eligible, employees who used the benefit, by location and by month. Camps held and attendance. The share of employees with at least one flagged result, by broad category, and the share of those who took a follow-up consultation. Spend against budget. Nothing about individuals, ever.
The aggregate risk picture is what makes the dashboard valuable to a CFO. A company that can see that a meaningful share of its workforce carries a flagged metabolic or cardiac marker, and that the health programme moved some of them into care, has a story about the benefit that is more than “we offered checks”. It is the difference between a perk and a programme, and it is what a renewal at a higher tier is built on.
Provide the dashboard live, in a portal the HR coordinator can log into, rather than as a quarterly deck. The deck is a sales artefact. The portal is a product, and a product is harder to switch away from.
The ethical boundary, stated plainly
The employer pays. The employee is the patient. The hospital’s obligation is to the patient, and no reporting to the employer may identify an individual’s results, directly or by a category small enough to infer from. Aggregate reporting only, with minimum group sizes, and a written data agreement in every corporate contract that says so. The employee should know what the employer sees, in plain language, at the point of consent.
I have been asked by HR teams for individual-level data more than once, always with a reasonable-sounding purpose. The answer is no, and the product should make it impossible rather than merely against policy. A dashboard that cannot drill to an individual is safer than a promise not to.
The account-management CRM
The reason corporate accounts lapse is that nobody was watching them between the signature and the renewal notice. A contract is a document. A relationship is a series of touches, and the CRM is where you make sure they happen.
Every corporate account needs a record with the contract terms, the eligible population, the HR contacts and their tenure, the camps scheduled, utilisation month by month, complaints and their resolution, and the renewal date with a review diarised a quarter ahead. It needs alerts: utilisation below the account’s own trend, a complaint unresolved for more than a few days, an HR contact who has left, a camp date approaching without registrations. The account manager should open the week with that list, not with a prospecting sheet.
The HR contact leaving is worth its own line. Corporate relationships in Indian cities are often personal, and when the HR head who signed moves on, the account is effectively unowned on the client side. The CRM should flag it, and the account manager should be in front of the successor within the month, with the dashboard, before a competitor is.
The P&L conversation
Finance sees corporate health as a discount line, and on a per-check basis it is. The case I built for investing in the product rather than the discount rested on three numbers the group had not been tracking: the share of corporate employees who became patients within a year, the revenue from those patients and their families beyond the check, and the renewal rate by account. Once those were visible, corporate health stopped looking like a discounted diagnostic business and started looking like the group’s cheapest acquisition channel with a retention problem. That framing got the portal, the camp tooling and the account team funded, and it is the framing I would use again.
If you’re starting this next quarter
- Weeks one to two: list every corporate account with its renewal date, utilisation if known, and the last contact. Find out which ones are due in the next two quarters and which have had a change of HR head.
- Weeks two to five: build the one-page utilisation dashboard from whatever data exists and take it, in person, to the accounts due for renewal. Ask what they present internally and adjust.
- Weeks five to eight: put pre-registration, slot booking and a single employee identifier into the camp flow. Run the next camp on it.
- Weeks eight to twelve: deliver reports into the app with a plain-language flag and a booking path. Set up the CRM account record and the alerts. Put the data agreement into every contract.
- Next quarter: measure employees who became patients and revenue beyond the check, and take that to finance.
The HR head does not renew a package. She renews the year she just had with you.
Further reading from primary sources
- IBEF: Healthcare industry in India: sector overview and growth drivers.
- National Health Authority: PM-JAY: India’s government-funded health assurance scheme.
Questions people ask
Because nobody watched the account between the signature and the renewal notice. The contract was sold on price and a package list, delivery was handed to the unit’s preventive-health department, and reporting was a spreadsheet sent when someone asked. The HR head then decides the renewal on three things the contract never mentioned: whether the camp embarrassed her, whether complaints were handled, and whether she had anything to show her own CFO.
Rarely price, unless the gap is large. In rough order: whether the experience embarrassed her in front of employees, whether the vendor was easy to deal with when something went wrong, whether the reporting gave her a story for her leadership, and whether employees used the benefit at all. Utilisation is the quiet killer: a health-check entitlement a third of staff use looks like a budget line two-thirds wasted.
The share of eligible employees who actually used the benefit, meaning they booked, turned up and completed the check. It is the number the HR head is measured on internally, and most hospital groups never report it because they do not track it. They know how many checks were done. They do not know how many employees were eligible, how many booked and did not come, and how many never engaged at all.
Do the digital preparation before anyone sets up a table. Pre-registration by link so the desk verifies rather than types. Slot booking so the queue is spread and employees know when to come down. One identifier per employee that follows the sample to the lab and the report back to the app. A message the evening before with the fasting instruction. A live dashboard for the HR coordinator. The clinical staff are usually fine. The product is what is missing.
Not on a per-check basis. A health check is a low-margin service, and finance is right to see it as a discount line. The margin lives in the journey afterwards: the employee with a flagged result who consults a specialist, brings a parent for the same check, and chooses your hospital when the family needs one. If the journey ends at the PDF, you have run a diagnostic business at a discount and nothing more.
The report should land in the group’s app or patient portal, not only in email. Flagged results should carry a plain-language explanation and a next step. A consultation with the relevant speciality should be bookable in two taps at the nearest unit. And the CRM should record the flag and follow up gently if no booking is made within a few weeks. Within strict ethical limits, this is the highest-converting journey in the group.
No. The employer pays, but the employee is the patient, and the hospital’s obligation is to the patient. Reporting to the employer must be aggregate only, with minimum group sizes so nobody can be inferred from a small category, and a written data agreement in every contract saying so. I have been asked for individual data more than once, always with a reasonable-sounding purpose. The product should make it impossible, not merely against policy.
Build exactly what the HR head has to present internally, which is usually one page. Employees eligible and employees who used the benefit, by location and month. Camps held and attendance. The share of employees with at least one flagged result by broad category, and the share of those who took a follow-up consultation. Spend against budget. Nothing about individuals, ever. Deliver it live in a portal, not as a quarterly deck.
Contract terms, eligible population, HR contacts and their tenure, camps scheduled, utilisation month by month, complaints and their resolution, and the renewal date with a review diarised a quarter ahead. Then alerts: utilisation below the account’s own trend, a complaint unresolved for more than a few days, a camp approaching without registrations, and an HR contact who has left. The account manager should open the week with that list, not a prospecting sheet.
A named account manager, working from the CRM, not the sales team that signed the deal and moved on. The HR contact leaving deserves its own rule: corporate relationships in Indian cities are often personal, and when the HR head who signed moves on, the account is unowned on the client side. The account manager should be in front of the successor within the month, dashboard in hand, before a competitor is.
One quarter to get the basics in place, another to show finance the numbers. Weeks one to two: list every account with renewal date, utilisation and last contact. Weeks two to five: build the one-page dashboard and take it to accounts due for renewal. Weeks five to eight: pre-registration, slot booking and a single identifier in the camp flow. Weeks eight to twelve: reports into the app, CRM alerts, the data agreement in every contract.
With three numbers the group is usually not tracking: the share of corporate employees who became patients within a year, the revenue from those patients and their families beyond the check, and the renewal rate by account. Once those are visible, corporate health stops looking like a discounted diagnostic line and starts looking like the group’s cheapest acquisition channel with a retention problem. That framing got the portal, camp tooling and account team funded.
Yes, and arguably more easily, because the account list is short and the HR heads are reachable in person. The product elements (pre-registration, slot booking, a report in the app, a one-page utilisation dashboard, a CRM record per account) do not need group scale. What a single hospital cannot do is compete on package price with the diagnostic chains, which is exactly why it should compete on the product instead.
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