As household budgets remained under pressure, we continued to deliver more value and greater health and wellbeing support for our customers.
People continued to prioritise their health and wellbeing and the private health insurance market growth remained strong. We increased resident policyholders by more than 14,000. While this wasn’t what we set out to achieve, given the competitive market we remained disciplined about the best way to grow for the long term. We continued to see strong momentum in our non-resident business, which grew by 69,000 policy units.
Greater value, more savings
Our Members’ Choice Advantage network saved customers around $23 million in out-of-pocket costs, and more than $25 million in Live Better rewards were redeemed this year – including more than $8 million in cover rewards such as savings on premiums.
We expanded the procedures covered by our no gap program, now at 35 hospitals, and saw a 38% increase in the number of customers going through the program. Our new range of silver and gold hospital cover are one of the only products in market that ensure customers going to hospital for a no gap procedure have no excess and no out-of-pocket costs.
We also announced an additional $305 million in COVID give back to our customers, bringing our total customer support to a record $1.46 billion, and kept our premium increase below inflation and wage growth.
And we reduced our own costs by around $10 million, which we think is really important given the economic environment.
More health and wellbeing support
Almost half of Medibank policyholders are now engaging with our health and wellbeing services and our Live Better rewards program has grown to 823,000 members.
Our focus on prevention saw around 132,000 enrolments in our clinician-led preventative programs and 2 new self-paced digital prevention programs – Back Smart and Heart Wise – that we introduced in Live Better rewards. We also announced a new partnership with healthcare technology leader Amwell to help deliver our digital prevention programs at scale, with the first to launch later this year.
We extended our 24/7 nurse and mental health support lines to an additional 700,000 customers and provided more virtual health interactions to our customers, including around 29,000 complimentary health checks. We also supported more than 1 in 4 eligible customers going to hospital through our Health Concierge program.
Investing in the health transition
Through our investments in prevention and primary care, virtual health and homecare, we’re giving our customers and the community more choice in their healthcare. We’re also accelerating the health transition needed to keep the health system sustainable for the long term.
We delivered more than 4 million health interactions through our primary care network, incorporating Amplar Health and Myhealth services. Our Amplar Health team is now delivering around 1,000 homecare visits a day to people across Australia and our prevention and homecare programs saved around 193,000 hospital bed days this year.
Through our investments in short stay models of care we’re offering customers and the community greater value and choice. The Orthopaedic Institute at Macquarie University Hospital opened in February while construction continued on Adeney Private Hospital in Melbourne. And as part of our iMH joint venture with Aurora to support innovative mental healthcare, we opened a second hospital - with a third to open later this year in Brisbane.
Improved customer experiences
Our work to make things simpler and more personalised for our customers helped us achieve our highest customer advocacy in 4 years.
New features across our digital channels such as improved messaging and AI are supporting our people to have better conversations and providing a more intuitive easy to use experience for our customers.
Our trial connecting customers to local team members delivered fantastic results in customer satisfaction and employee engagement. And we’re set to roll this out nationally.
We continue to strengthen our foundations to build further business resilience and customer trust.
Delivering for shareholders
Our shareholders will receive a fully franked final ordinary dividend of 9.4 cents per share bringing our total fully franked dividend to 16.6 cents per share.
Key financials
Our result reflects continued resilience in our resident health insurance business, demonstrates the important contribution non-resident makes to our overall business growth, and highlights both the organic and inorganic growth potential in Medibank Health.
Group operating profit, which excludes the impacts of COVID-19, was up 7.9% to $699.8 million. This reflects 6.3% increase in Health Insurance operating profit, and strong growth in Medibank Health segment profit of 36.7% including the contribution of our increased investment in Myhealth.
For further information please contact
For media
Emily Ritchie
Hub Lead, External Affairs
+61 429 642 418
emily.ritchie@medibank.com.au
For investors/analysts
Colette Campbell
Hub Lead, Investor Relations
+61 475 975 770
investor.relations@medibank.com.au
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