An expanding Angolan health insurance provider

Angola

José Aguiar Neto, CEO of Unisaúde, talks to The Energy Year about how the company’s role in Angola’s oil and gas sector has evolved in the past few years, how its shift to providing healthcare insurance has impacted its strategy and how it addresses medical needs offshore. Unisaúde is a health benefits and health insurance provider.

How has the role of Unisaúde in Angola’s oil and gas sector evolved in the past few years?
We consider ourselves a medical company. We understand that oil and gas companies need to offer health benefits, so they are our clients. We started operating in 2010. In 2011 we received our first significant client, which was SLB. Since then, we have had consistent and sustainable growth.
Our focus is on managing health benefits for companies. We started working with oil and gas companies in Angola. Over time, we moved our focus to work with companies that were self-insured, managing their health insurance plans but not providing insurance solutions per se. These companies include SLB, TotalEnergies and Azule Energy.
With time we noticed that catering to self-insured companies was a restricted market. To be self-insured, you must be large enough so that one expensive case will not be substantial relative to the rest of your costs.
Therefore, we decided to expand, creating Unisaúde Seguros, which allows us to provide health insurance directly to small and medium-sized companies that cannot afford to be self-insured.
Later we created Unisaúde Clínicas, a network of our own clinics exclusively dedicated to providing healthcare services to our clients. They are also the basis for our health programmes – we take care of more than 1,000 patients with chronic diseases.

How has Unisaúde’s shift to providing healthcare insurance directly impacted the company’s strategy?
When we started in early 2023, there were high expectations, and the other competitors were nervous when we became an insurance company. We did not set an aggressive offer in the market. We are simply preparing solutions that can better service specific gaps in the market.
Today, we are focusing on expanding our network of clinics, and our intention with that is double. We want to offer better support to our clients – especially those in the oil industry – but these clinics will also offer cheaper solutions for the clients with smaller budgets. We intend to launch in 2024. It’s something new.
We are increasingly investing in IT as well. We are making a new, intelligent system, which is under construction. This will allow us to have management reports with real-time information, and they will be very easy to customise. The new system will also help us provide real-time information to our clients. Basically, we are growing, and we expect to improve our service level to support this growth.

How does Unisaúde cater to oil and gas companies’ offshore medical needs?
One of our clinics in Luanda, which was remodelled in early 2024, is dedicated exclusively to our oil and gas clients. However, we understand that our clients have significant needs at their offshore assets. This is the reason why we have a partnership with Via Medica International Healthcare. We always participate in offshore services tenders along with them.
Our core business is managing health benefits, the health systems of the clients. We not only provide access to treatments, but we also pay attention to the problems people have and the solutions they need. Moreover, oil companies require occupational health services, such as offshore checkup services. We have solutions for all their needs thanks to our strong partnership with Via Medica.

What is your key growth strategy for 2024?
We had significant growth in 2023 but mostly among self-insured clients. For 2024 we expect to grow more as an insurance company, offering clients different products and selling them directly to them. We are launching our solutions to brokers.
There are some services that are normally not covered in healthcare insurance in Angola, such as routine consultations. Insurance products normally don’t cover these, but we understand that prevention is very important for everyone, so we decided to cover them.
Moreover, for example, when a company excludes some members of a healthcare policy, the rule in the local market is that the premium is refunded only if the member has not used it. By contrast, we are going to always reimburse the totality of the premium. Our intention for 2024 is to offer good new products and innovate in this exciting industry.

What do you expect Unisaúde to look like five years from now?
In five years I expect to consolidate our group as the leader in the healthcare market in terms of health benefits solutions. We don’t want to provide services to the mass market. Today our focus is providing solutions to corporate clients. We intend to offer healthcare solutions for families but only in the near future.
When we have economic growth, health markets always expand because health benefits are the most desired benefits among employees. Hopefully, if we return to good economic growth, we will have a natural expansion of this market.

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