RecoMed digitises wellness days for Bankmed members

One of the most challenging setbacks of the global pandemic has been the disruption in healthcare across South Africa. Our ability to maintain general wellness, engage in routine preventative health measures and access medical treatments have all been compromised or delayed, particularly during COVID-19 peak periods. In many instances, remote working has proved challenging for many employees to access their corporate wellness programmes, which are often their touch points for essential health checks, screenings and services. For medical scheme providers, which actively offer preventative health benefits to their members, this has been a grave concern over the past 20 months.

It is for this reason that Bankmed, the leading medical scheme provider for the South African banking industry, has partnered with health tech innovator, RecoMed, the fastest growing online healthcare booking platform and marketplace platform in South Africa. The partnership is powered by innovative tech solutions to connect Bankmed members to critical healthcare services.

This year, instead of members skipping their health checks or not getting the health counselling they needed, hundreds of Bankmed members have booked their wellness appointments online and attended specially convened wellness days, even though they were working remotely.

The RecoMed powered booking portal facilitated appointments for mammograms, pap smears, various primary health assessments and HIV/Aids counselling. Bankmed hosted the private appointments at the Johannesburg Country Club over a two-day period. Dr Dalen Alexander, Bankmed’s Wellness and Innovations manager, says: “This was a resounding success with member centricity at the core of our efforts in collaboration with RecoMed. We are pleased that we were able to transform our current processes through digitisation to improve health by providing consistent access to wellness and preventive care benefits during the pandemic. We look forward to rolling this out at scale in 2022 across all provinces.''

A key achievement for RecoMed, which is expanding its white-label services, was the full and rapid response from the Bankmed members. All available appointments were booked within 48 hours of opening the portal to the Bankmed community. This was an unprecedented responsiveness that far exceeded the speed of adoption by users of the RecoMed-powered platform, which serves as a “Booking.com” type platform for the health industry and powers more than 100 000 healthcare appointments every month.

Sheraan Amod, CEO of RecoMed, explains: “We were delighted to provide the technology to enable this important initiative by Bankmed, and we were excited to see the overwhelming response from their members. Plans are under way to increase the menu of services, as well as introduce further digitisations that enhance the Bankmed member experience and increase their easy access to health and wellness services. We have seen accelerated adoption of tech-powered solutions that people want and that will stick, because they genuinely make their lives easier and better. I believe there’s no more important industry where this transformation needs to happen than in healthcare.”