If I look at how the medical subscription model has evolved this year, we are actually celebrating 30 years of Regina Maria subscriptions this year, said Raluca Binder, Corporate Sales Director, Subscriptions Division, Regina Maria at Work Compass HR Conference organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest. “I have been working in medical services since 2010, so roughly 16 years now, and I have seen the evolutions over time. They can change, and I would say the evolutions have been truly spectacular.”
“In the beginning, the subscription was more functional. It had a functional role: you needed it to access medical consultations and tests, and it solved that problem of long waiting times in the public‑sector services – a problem that hasn’t necessarily been solved in the meantime, but which was a major issue. Now, however, it is rather, and we truly believe this, the main prevention tool inside organizations. It has transformed fantastically in recent years.”
She added: “We have grown a lot over these 30 years. We now manage 1.1 million subscriptions and we collaborate with over 13,500 companies. So, we are truly privileged to have a portfolio that has grown so strongly and that has challenged us over time.”
“When we look not only at the structure of the medical subscription, but also at the whole package of integrated medical services that goes beyond basic care – into psychotherapy, for example, or into dental prevention, which is becoming an increasingly relevant need – we see that the conversations we have with HR teams are starting from employee feedback, which pleases us very much. We also sit on a mountain of data. We have that information which guides us and helps us understand what the access trends are and in which directions we need to outline certain types of subscription structures.”
“Personalization, in my view, is the key, both in the area of medical subscriptions and here we look at which age group the population belongs to, how they are distributed across the country, and which industry they are active in. In one way we build a benefit plan, a medical subscription for a factory; in another way we look at a medical‑services subscription for a company in IT. The same applies to the wellbeing projects and campaigns we run – they go exactly in this direction.”
“In one way we build the communication messages for a BPO company, where the average age is 25–30, and we need to understand what messages help them grasp what we want to say there. In another way we design wellbeing programs for IT companies, where we talk about more experienced employees, an older average age, so we adapt the messages. The same applies in factories or in the automotive sector, where messages very often go more offline than online.”
“We adapt these messages and we build together with HR teams what the communication should look like, so that we can reach, together, our wellbeing objectives and shape what the benefit really means for employees. And yes, it depends on context, on generations, and on the needs, we are actually trying to identify and set as objectives for everything we want to develop.”
“The medical subscription has become an extra‑salary benefit that is in high demand. You find it almost in every company; for a long time, it has ceased to be a ‘nice to have’. But above all, we see that it is clearly also a cost‑saving mechanism. In reality, as we have seen, a subscriber saves on average up to about 3,500 lei per year. If we make a comparison, that would be almost the equivalent of a minimum gross salary in Romania.”
“It is clear that this is a direction all companies are looking toward, and it is something employees want because it is a real need that helps us focus on prevention and on everything that means taking care of health.”