Health Insurer Looks to Replace Laptops with iPads

PCs are falling out of favor with consumers who are turning more to large-form mobile devices, and the same may be true for some insurers.

Freedom Health, a provider of Medicare and Medicaid plans in Florida, has selected a mobile enterprise application platform from Vancouver-based Flowfinity Wireless with the goal of reducing the use of paper and laptops in its sales process.

Flowfinity will be used to create a mobile solution that can replace existing sales forms and support entire business processes on mobile devices with minimal programming. It also can capture data offline, including signatures and photos, and can support for offline lookups of data such as doctor or prospect contact information.

"We evaluated a number of enterprise mobility solutions, but Flowfinity was the only solution that met our requirements for offline data capture, integration, and ease of configuration," says Kevin Adhia, Vice President of Information Systems, Freedom Health. "Flowfinity enabled us to build a complex mobile information system, customized specifically for our business, in just two weeks."

It's not just iPads that are gaining favor. A life insurance company in Japan recently made a large purchase of Windows tablets for its sales force. It's clear that the preferred form factor for insurance professionals is changing.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio