By Sanchit Malik,
Burnout, chronic stress, exhaustion—these are not just challenges but have become part of everyday workplace conversations in India.
11,000 employees across eight countries reported experiencing burnout, reported Boston Consulting Group (BCG). This alarming statistic serves as a wake-up call for organizations everywhere.
With burnout rates rising globally, 2025 is emerging as a pivotal year for workplace wellness, with technology playing a key role in driving this transformation.
What’s Next in Workplace Wellness
It is time for Indian corporations to prioritize employee benefits to make them feel valued and supported.
‘Employee Benefits’- The name itself signals the empathetic bond of employers and employees. Great employers are fully invested in ensuring their employees are healthy, motivated and productive.
Employee Benefits have gradually traversed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Beyond wages to cover basic physiological needs. employers ensure safety and security – via Health, Accident & Life Insurance.
These are now further being enhanced to support proactive health & wellness, via benefits like doctor consultations, mental wellness services and fitness.
As the benefits landscape evolved, one aspect that is now catching up is the use of modern technology to ensure effective accessibility and delivery of benefits. Traditionally, finance, supply chain and sales have been the primary focus areas of enterprise automation. Now organizations are looking at using technology in the people and benefits management space to drive efficiency, productivity and effectiveness.
The Role of Technology in Streamlining Insurance & Healthcare Benefits
The domain of Insurance has traditionally been dominated by a manual, people driven approach. However, as players in the whole ecosystem have modernized, there is now opportunity to drive a measurable impact in service delivery using technology.
A few key outcomes that are being impacted are:
- Cashless processes- The whole economy is going digital and so is healthcare. Cashless treatment is a process by which insurers, TPAs, brokers and hospitals work in concert to provide a digital and paperless way of providing healthcare to employees. Furthermore, it ensures employees do not have to keep a rainy day fund for the high out of pocket expenses that a medical emergency may entail.
At Pazcare in 2024 37% of claims were cashless amounting to ₹66 crores. Employers monitor the claims to ensure that a majority of employee needs are met in a digital, cashless process. Progressive organizations are keeping Cashless claims at 65% or more to ensure happier employees.
- Settlement TATs- When a loved one is hospitalized, leaving the hospital quickly is the most important thing on our minds! Most of us have experienced hours or even days of waiting for insurance approvals to catch up and expedite exit from a hospital. Even in case of post-paid or reimbursement claims, a wait of 30 or more days to get paid was not uncommon! With technology playing the facilitator, now the state of the art is moving to ensuring cashless settlement within 1.5 hours and complete reimbursements within 10 days or less.
- Multi-channel support- Technology is enabling better delivery of support to employees. Young, social media savvy employees may prefer quick, asynchronous interactions over email. Other employees may prefer email or picking up the phone. Around 2000+ queries were resolved within 5 minutes for cashless hospitalization by Pazcare’s hotline support.
This is being facilitated by digitization of the whole value chain – from billing, to the communication between the doctors, hospitals, TPAs and insurers. Within these organizations, digital records are speeding up the workflows from one department to another (for example between underwriters and customer service agents), leading to faster settlement.
- The measured self- Increasingly, employers are trying to use data to be proactive in managing their employees’ health – analyzing healthcare data like claims records, and even driving innovative measures to motivate health and wellbeing like promoting employees staying active via rewarding measurement of steps and vitals using smartwatches!
Pazcare’s Technological Contributions
- HR Dashboard:
HR Dashboard by Pazcare, brings structure so you can track all the day-to-day health benefits administration and focus on the important aspects for your business. You can design, implement and administer insurance for your employees seamlessly. You can now offload all your insurance paperwork and claims follow up to Pazcare.
- Pazcare App:
One App for all the insurance and preventive health needs. From downloading health cards, to booking health checkups to consulting doctors for any symptoms, Pazcare app is the go-to place. employee’s queries about their group health insurance package, their easy access to health cards and also their go-to during emergencies.
- Automated Claims:
Post a health emergency if someone is to raise a claim with their insurance claim, Pazcare gives the facilitation of pre-filled forms to expedite the claim process.
Future Outlook
- Continuing digitization of all processes- Technologies like electronic health records (EHRs), Electronic Identity management, Digilockers etc. will continue to drive digitization in each process. As insurers build API based integration capabilities, increasingly systems of each participant will talk to each other seamlessly and allow end to end digital processing of information.
- Personalization-
- Just like a great HR partner, technology will allow organizations to listen to each employee’s needs and help them in a way that matters for them. Technologies like Pazcare’s Flexible Onboarding that allow employees to choose from a variety of benefits curated by their employers will ensure each employee can maximize their personal satisfaction from employee benefits. GPT enabled assistants will understand and respond to concerns just like a concerned HR person.
- Utilizing health data & risk assessments at an individual level will be the next level of optimization in the space. It may allow insurers to price more accurately, but more importantly allow organizations to provide the right benefits to every employee and help them be more proactive about their healthcare.
- Emerging role of GPTs- Different players have started experimenting with GPTs to assist in employee assistance and service delivery. From providing a preliminary guidance on understanding symptoms, to removing complexity in accessing different services via simple chat interfaces, or converting paper forms into digital form seamlessly. However, this is just scratching the surface – the true potential of AI technology in the space is yet to be discovered and may range from automated underwriting to full fledged service assistants.
- Protecting Privacy- A big concern area that is going to emerge is the ability of all the players, especially employers, to protect the sensitive personal information of their employees and ensure it is not misused. As more information is digitized, the risk of it’s leakage and misuse is also amplified. Technology players will need to stay on their toes to build in state of the art anonymization, masking, encryption, cybersecurity and permissions management into their products.
- Technology players- Just as tech is disrupting multiple industries, technology players like Pazcare are stepping up to these opportunities. By integrating multiple providers and services into secure platforms, they enable HR teams to manage delivery of much more benefits efficiently, at the same time creating a seamless experience for employees.
5. Technology meets Empathy
Put together, these developments provide an encouraging vision of a future where employers can be truly empathetic to the specific needs and circumstances of each employee and be able to support them with a personal touch through every step of their journey in using employee benefits to stay healthy, happy and motivated.
Technology will play a vital role in enabling HR teams to reach out to employees at the right time and with the right help, without needing to increase cost.
(The above article is written by Sanchit Malik, CEO and Co-Founder of Pazcare, views are personal)
(Sanchit Malik is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pazcare, a pioneering platform transforming the employee benefits landscape in India. With a mission to simplify and enhance access to health insurance and employee benefits, Sanchit leads a growing team of over 170 professionals, serving renowned companies like Mamaearth, Vedantu, Mindtickle, Treebo Hotels, and Chaayos.
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