By ensuring customers are at the heart of what we do, and being disciplined in how we run our business, we’ve delivered a strong result in FY21.
More and more people in Australia are continuing to prioritise their health and wellbeing and see more value in private health, given uncertainty around COVID and heightened pressure on the public health system.
The investments we’ve made over the last few years have enabled us to step up and provide broader support to our customers during this period, while accelerating our growth at the same time.
Customers are voting with their feet, engaging with our broader health offerings at record levels. We grew policyholders by 82,500, including 29,600 for the Medibank brand. We’ve grown more in the past 12 months than we have in over 10 years, with our market share up 37 basis points.
Our employees have done an incredible job while dealing with the challenges of the pandemic in FY21. Repeated lockdowns and restrictions have failed to dampen their desire to help our customers, instead, we’ve achieved our highest ever customer advocacy.
Supporting our customers’ health and wellbeing
Our customers are trusting us to support their health and wellbeing, engaging with our broader offerings at record levels. Around 133,000 people were supported by our Member Health Services this year, and COVID drove even greater demand for our homecare and telehealth services. Our Live Better program - which encourages healthy behaviours and rewards customers for making healthy choices – has seen around 760,000 interactions with Live Better Rewards or Activities.
Partnering on better models of care
We’ve partnered with doctors and hospitals to give customers more choice about where they can receive their care and more control over what they pay for it. We expanded our short-stay, no-gap program so more than half a million Medibank customers could access it at 7 hospitals across the country. We also announced a joint venture with 45 specialist doctors to develop a private hospital in Melbourne to extend the short-stay, no-gap model to a range of procedures. And in January, we began delivering hospital-level care at home for public patients in Adelaide, through our joint venture with Calvary to deliver Wellbeing SA’s My Home Hospital service.
More value, better experiences
We paid $5.6 billion in claims this year. We’ve worked hard to deliver more value from our products and services, investing in technology to simplify and personalise our customers’ experience, while continuing to support those who prefer help face-to-face. We also delivered our lowest average premium increase in 20 years and managed our own costs with around $20 million in cost savings this year. Our passionate people are fundamental to our customers’ experience and our Medibank and ahm brands achieved their highest ever customer advocacy.
Record customer support
We’ve delivered the largest support package in our history – providing around $300 million in COVID financial support to date, including $103 million we’re giving back to customers in premium relief as a result of COVID permanent net claims savings. We’ll continue to assess known permanent net claims savings due to COVID and return these to customers. We also have ongoing hardship measures and mental health support in place for those doing it tough.
We’re putting our full support behind the Government’s vaccination target. As instructed by the government, our aged care workers are required to be vaccinated by September 17. We are working with our other frontline health workers to ensure that they are all vaccinated too. We continue to encourage the rest of our employees to get vaccinated through the use of paid leave and charitable donations on their behalf, and will also be rewarding eligible customers who are fully vaccinated with 1,000 Live Better Reward points.
We also continue to support the national COVID response – assisting Federal and State governments through phone support, welfare checks, in-home COVID testing, contact tracing and mental health services.
Delivering for our shareholders
Our shareholders will receive a final ordinary dividend of 6.9 cents per share fully franked. This takes our total FY21 ordinary dividend to 12.7 cents per share fully franked.
Our key financials
We delivered a solid financial result with Group net profit after tax up 39.8% on last year. This was driven by investment income being more than $117 million above last year when markets were impacted by COVID, as well as Health Insurance operating profit up 14.4%. Medibank Health segment profit was also up 12.9%.
What’s next
As we become a health company, our strategy is evolving but our customers and people remain at the centre of all that we do.
We will continue to provide real choice through our Medibank and ahm brands – expanding our relationships with our customers and providers, offering broader health and wellbeing support, and focusing on prevention, innovation and value.
We’ll also keep investing and partnering with doctors, hospitals and governments to bring better models of care to Australia, accessible to patients in both private and public systems.
And we continue to play our important role in helping ensure our health system can support all people in Australia, both now and in the future.
Further enquiries
For media
Meaghan Telford
Senior Executive, External Affairs
+61 457 551 211 meaghan.telford@medibank.com.au
For investors/analysts
Colette Campbell
Senior Executive, Investor Relations
+61 475 975 770 investor.relations@medibank.com.au
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