Irish Life Health Members 4+

Big improvement on old version.

I had attended my GP and had an issue that didn’t clear up within a fortnight. I became concerned and wanted a 2nd opinion. I used the option to send a message to a doctor who would then revert within minutes with a reply. 2 days later, I am still waiting on a reply. I then requested a GP call, the first available appointment was almost 2 working days later. When the GP rang me, the notes that I had provided at booking had not been fully taken or passed over. So I had to waste time telling the story from the beginning again. The doctor told me my issue was vague (it was extremely specific) and she asked me one question about my issue and advised me to go to see my doctor. I advised that I had and she was very nonchalant and said well that’s all I can say. She was American and I felt that she didn’t understand what the system or options were in Ireland.

This is the 2nd time I’ve used this service, both time’s extremely unsatisfactory and a total waste of time for both my and the doctor.
It’s as if they’re charging for a service which is ‘go see your GP’ and charging for a visit.
Appalling.

I recently had an enforced change from Laya to Irish Life Health because that’s who my new employer uses. This app is dreadful:

- The claim submission process is clunky compared to Laya. Why multiple pages? When you eventually get to the final step, it takes 20-30 seconds to confirm that the claim has been successfully submitted when it was almost instant with Laya.
- I was trying to view policy details number a short time ago. The ‘Policy Details’ button was initially completely unresponsive. Eventually it responded by switching to a screen that showed an endless spinner and never actually loaded the details.
- I used the app twice today within the space of 15 minutes and it forced me to log in for the second visit, even though I previously hadn’t used it for two weeks but wasn’t forced to log in again. It didn’t even remember my email addres and, worse still, required me I to type the email address twice to log in.
- The ‘app’ seems to be just a web view on what is really a web app because it has occasionally rendered an error web page within the app.

My advice to anyone who asks me about changing to Irish Life Health would be this. Managing one’s health can be stressful enough without having to battle with crappy technology from an insurer who clearly is cutting way too many corners. I would advise them to go with an insurer with a solid tech platform.