About

Covariance is a company focusing on innovation in health and health insurance through the exploitation of data and AI by combining unique domain knowledge with the nitty gritty of advanced analytics and AI. The company is empowering leading healthcare organizations and health insurance companies to deliver Data-Driven and AI solutions that shape the industry, while supports them to maximize their customers’ value and minimize costs by integrating real-time analysis into existing systems and processes. Covariance excels in data-driven innovation in two extremely connected domains, health and health insurance and has designed a bundle of advanced services and products for health insurance and healthcare markets. Among them, PHI, which is in the preliminary stage of design, is the most innovative service/product that will provide a unified solution for confronting the main issues of health insurance market.

Solution & Product

Covariance, among other projects, has designed and developed a non-operational prototype, of an integrated expert management system (a web platform) powered by AI, which aims to offer a one-stop service for insurance customers and services’ providers as well as health insurance expenditure control mechanism for private healthcare insurance companies. This unique tool is called “PHI" and will offer a unified solution for confronting the main issues of health insurance market, that are, (i) the market is characterized by a plethora of stakeholders who between them have a countless number of individual arrangements, (ii) main stakeholders in this market are insurance companies, theirs clients, doctors, hospitals and diagnostic units providing healthcare services, (iii) clients sign tailor made insurance contracts of different types, for services which are provided by several health services providers, (iv) the gatekeepers of the process, medical practitioners, set a separate layer of complexity, with insurance companies not having full visibility of the authorization process for treatments and diagnostic services, (iv) health services providers have to manage and execute referrals from several different sources in a way that usually involved complex manual processes, (v) all these processes produce a vast amount of data in sparse non-connected information systems that are not exploited in order to give valuable insights, since data capturing is done in all parts of chain.

Innovation & Scalability

Healthcare insurance in Greece is fragmented and characterized by the lack of application of data analytics. In addition, each private provider of health services operates by their own manual procedures, which also includes reporting to health insurance companies. Covariance’s PHI has been designed in order to unify all the independent procedures into one service. In addition, PHI embeds advanced analytic procedures using machine learning in order to provide valuable insights to health insurance companies. PHI could be scaled accordingly and implemented to any country with a similar healthcare insurance system. It would therefore set a paradigm for implementation elsewhere.

Traction & achievements

Covariance is expanding rapidly. Established at the middle of June 2019 in Maroussi, as a sole shareholder company, now has a team of 22 employees, 4 contracted expert advisors, and a big number of contracted data scientists and experts. At the end of 2020, Covariance initiated a second installation in Kifissia, while from the beginning of 2021 is a proud member of Nvidia accelerator hub and, has been selected as one of the twenty-three SMEs from 11 different countries, from the European Health Data Evidence Network (EHDEN), to receive training and become a certified SME of to the community. Covariance has been certified by EHDEN after proof of its theoretical and practical capacity for standardizing health data to the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM). The company is ISO certified, and GDPR compliant in both internal & external processes. Covariance's biggest milestone are the innovative ideas that arose out of our people’s expertise and vast experience in the health and health insurance industry. Those ideas are the backbone of everything company does. Over the time we have advised several companies about the unexploited technologies that can be used in healthcare and healthcare insurance. Finally, Covariance has managed to not only secure initial funding by bootstrapping and to invest in new people experts in data science, but to be commissioned to deliver on large projects for the next two years for our clients.

Team & Why Us

Covariance is a collective effort of some of the best-in-their-field experts in healthcare and health insurance. Company’s team is a unique skill mix of Academics, Data Scientists, Economists, Insurers, Pharma Executives, and Healthcare managers, combining vast experience in the private and public health insurance sector. Covariance excels in data-driven innovation. All company’s team members are educated to at least Master’s level while most of them are PhDs or PhD candidates and company’s long-term contractors are academic leaders in the fields of Insurance, Big Data and AI. We excel in data-driven innovation in two extremely connected domains.

Funding Needs

Covariance has designed a bundle of advanced services and products for health insurance and healthcare markets. Among them, PHI is the most innovative service/product that provides a unified solution for confronting the main issues of health insurance market. A non-operable prototype of PHI is available while the development of the application for large-scale use is pending. In order to create a spin off to implement the development, an investment of approximately 2 million euros is needed which corresponds to approximately 200 man-months of work and new infrastructures.