HealthMetrics, co-founded by Alvin Yuan, aims to bridge the gap between companies and insurance and healthcare providers while enabling them to better manage employee benefits
In Southeast Asia, healthcare expenditure is rising, with the total amount of spending estimated to increase by nearly 75 percent, from $425 billion currently to $740 billion by 2025. This presents challenges for companies, as they need to adapt to the evolving healthcare landscape and address the rising demand for quality healthcare services.
Recognising this, Malaysian entrepreneur Alvin Yuan co-founded the digital platform HealthMetrics to help streamline employee healthcare management for businesses, while connecting them with healthcare providers. The goal is to enable employers to manage employee healthcare benefits efficiently and cost-effectively.
The platform currently has presence in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, with plans to expand to Thailand next.
Yuan shares more about his journey and business in his own words below.
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I graduated as a pharmacist but never practised. Instead, I dove into insurance management and spent a decade in healthcare financing, helping companies manage their healthcare policies. This included managing access to insurance and their wellness plans and helping them to reduce costs. That’s how I gained my knowledge of the insurance industry.
Sometimes, you have ideas to solve a problem but don’t act on them until the right time comes. It wasn’t until a mutual friend introduced me to my co-founder, Advent Phang, that the idea for HealthMetrics took off in 2015. I shared with him my observations about the gap in the market, where companies were not well connected to healthcare providers. He suggested that we create a solution and was confident that we could sell it, as I had already received requests from customers for it.
Running a healthcare-related business is challenging but rewarding. We learned a lot of lessons along the way, such as navigating strict regulations, especially since we have to process sensitive information. There’s also the complexity of navigating the Southeast Asia market when we expanded from Malaysia to Singapore and Indonesia. Every market is unique, forcing us to develop corresponding business strategies that would work for those respective markets.
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