Insuring Expats, One of the Country’s Fastest Growing Insurance Segments (w/Daniel McChesney, CEO TripDoctor)

Daniel McChesney, MD is the Founder and CEO of TripDoctor, pioneering digital health insurance and health care access for expats and nomads. As a world traveler and long-time expat, he saw an opportunity to improve the healthcare access issues of his fellow expats and nomads through better insurance products.

Expat insurance is a much larger market than travel insurance, a market of $25B where the rate of Americans moving abroad having tripled since the pandemic. TripDoctor is responding to that demand with an insurtech that makes expat healthcare simple, acting as a digital broker with access to the best plans and doctors for expats in their country-of-choice.

TripDoctor is a graduate of the Global Insurance Accelerator. The company's mission is to make expat healthcare simple, affordable, and accessible, and to improve the quality of life for expats.  In the longer-term, the company will help drive down the cost of care by keeping people out of the emergency department and utilizing more telehealth and outpatient visits. 

TripDoctor understands the local market policy standards and costs of care and expats situation, coupling them to products that make sense in that market, and connecting them with the best providers in that market.

Daniel describes a classic insurtech story of how the company pre-GIA would meet with carriers and ramp up meetings until they reached the predictable "no" person, either a threatened PnL owner or IT. And how the company realized through GIA they would write insurance themselves.

The company launched in Mexico, where expats are concentrated in five cities, building a network of physicians through neighborhoods where expats live. They work with local insurers to create products that are both attractive and accessible to expats. 

In terms of growth markets, TripDoctor is seeing high demand for other types of insurance beyond healthcare, for example in commercial business lines, as well as life products that work outside the US and work with reputable carriers.  

Daniel has +20 years of experience in early-stage MedTech, digital health and other healthcare ventures, Prior to TripDoctor, he co-founded DeciBio and helped to grow it into the industry standard for molecular testing and next-generation sequencing data analytics.  

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.