Today brings one less reason to carry around a wallet, with another plastic card now available digitally for Apple Wallet – your private health insurance card! HICAPS practitioners can now accept digital membership cards for health insurance claims.
Medibank, Bupa, HBF, nib and GU Health members can use their respective iPhone apps to add their membership cards into Apple Wallet, where it can then be used at 20,000 healthcare practices by simply holding their iPhone or Apple Watch near any HICAPS terminals in Australia.
And of course, members can pay for any gap payments simply and securely using Apple Pay.
These digital membership cards are ‘passes’ in Wallet as opposed to payment cards (like your existing Visa, Mastercard, Amex or eftpos cards), so they aren’t subject to the same limit of 12 cards Apple Pay is, and they automatically sync to your Apple Watch and any other iPhones using the same iCloud account (eg, a personal and a work iPhone for example).
And just like your other contactless passes in Wallet – like Woolworths’ Everyday Rewards pass – iPhone knows what pass to present when you hold it near the HICAPS terminal, so you don’t need to worry about spending seconds swiping to it first.
When adding a health insurance membership card to Apple Wallet, the customer identifier number is encrypted during transmission to the terminal and is then only decrypted by HICAPS and then passed on to the customer’s health insurer.
Adding your card to Wallet should be pretty straightforward; as soon as opening the nib app, it’s front and centre and Wallet will also ask if you want to enable automatic selection (so when you tap it at a HICAPS terminal, it’ll automatically select that pass)
Failing that, you can add your card in the nib app > ‘Account’ tab, > ‘My nib card’.
Similarly, Bupa is also pretty keen to help you add your membership card to Apple Wallet when you open the app (and a convenient time to be mid switching health funds, so I can compare both apps!)
Interestingly, if you have multiple cards including from different health funds, in Wallet they appear ‘next’ to each other – you swipe between them, rather than looking between other passes.
This implies that all the health funds are using the same ‘certificate’ and so they appear next to each other.
And just like that, one less plastic card to worry about carrying to your next dentist, or optometrist, or other health appointment, ready to use right on your wrist or in your pocket, and backed up in iCloud. Magic.