A pre-flight checklist for insurers entering the Maldives

If you cover travellers and some of them come to the Maldives, these are the questions worth settling before your first policyholder needs a bed — not during.

Nine questions

1. Where is your inpatient capacity? Guests are spread across hundreds of islands. Inpatient care is not. Know which facilities can actually admit, and what the transfer from a resort island looks like in hours.
2. Who takes the first call? At 3am local time, someone has to answer, in English, with authority to open a file. Establish who that is before you need them.
3. What does the hospital need before it admits? Written eligibility and an advised limit. Decide in advance who issues those and how fast.
4. What is your guarantee turnaround? A proforma will arrive and you will be asked to guarantee against it. If that takes three working days, plan for what happens in the meantime.
5. What documentation standard do you need? Itemised invoice, discharge summary, laboratory and pharmacy breakdowns. Say so up front and it will be collected as a matter of course.
6. What is your credit period? Whatever it is, it has to be compatible with the settlement window the hospital expects. Someone has to carry the gap.
7. How is an excess handled? Agree now who tells the patient, and when. The answer should always be “before discharge”.
8. Who coordinates a repatriation? Usually your own provider — but the local file, the clinical documents and the fit-to-fly assessment have to travel with it.
9. What happens on a disputed claim? Define the escalation route while nobody is upset.

The pattern behind all nine

Every question above is really the same question: has this been agreed in advance, or will it be improvised during a live case? Improvisation is expensive, and it is most expensive at exactly the moment when a patient is waiting.

Terms agreed before the first case, not during it.

A reasonable sequence

A short call about how your policies actually read. Draft terms against that wording rather than a template. Agreement on the credit and settlement windows. Signature. A named coordinator and a direct line. Then, eventually, a first case — which by that point is the least eventful part of the whole exercise.