Although Hoosh Mires (pictured) did not initially plan a career in insurance, his route into the sector began with Freedom Health Insurance in its early stages. After studying economics with the intention of beginning his career in banking, he joined the family-founded business shortly after it was launched in 2003 by his mother-in-law, an established health insurance sales leader. What began as an opportunity to support a growing family business has since become a career spanning more than two decades, giving him a broad perspective on the company, its development and the wider market. Today he is Freedom Health Insurance’s Global COO.
That longevity matters because Mires has seen the health insurance market change from a far more crowded field into one dominated by fewer players. He notes that when Freedom Health started there were more than 20 health insurers in the UK, whereas today the number is closer to seven or eight, reflecting years of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions. Freedom Health, by contrast, has remained in the market and expanded beyond the UK into international markets. Mires’s role is global, not purely domestic, and that exposure shapes the way he talks about both operations and future growth.
The most revealing part of Mires’s thinking is that he does not begin digital transformation with platforms, channels or AI. He begins with the nature of the insurance product itself. In his view, every insurance product is essentially a promise: an undertaking that when the client needs support, the insurer will deliver. In health insurance, that promise is especially sensitive, because the claim event is personal, emotional and often urgent.
That informs how Freedom Health defines transformation. The operational focus is not digitalisation for its own sake, but improving how the business services policies, supports members and handles claims efficiently, from clearer communication and easier information exchange to timely, accurate claim payments. Mires places particular emphasis on speed and usability: reducing friction in the exchange of information, improving responsiveness, and making interaction simpler for members at the moment they need the service.
This matters because health insurance has historically been structured in a reactive way. As Mires describes it, the traditional model has often been to use a service first and then claim back afterwards. Freedom Health’s aim is to shift more of that into a real-time environment, where support is accessible as and when members need it. That is particularly relevant in areas such as primary care, mental health, musculoskeletal services and dermatology, all of which he identifies as part of the company’s Freedom 360 proposition.
His distinction between health and other lines is blunt and effective. Health Insurance requires a different degree of empathy, urgency and clinical sensitivity. Freedom Health’s claims team reflects that philosophy, with a stronger-than-average presence of nurses and qualified doctors, which Mires argues improves the quality of claimant interactions.
If one theme dominates the interview, it is data. Mires returns to it repeatedly as the underlying enabler of efficiency, visibility, transparency and automation. His point is not abstract. The business case, in his telling, is that without the right data structure, none of the more attractive elements of transformation work reliably at scale.
Freedom 360 appears to be the clearest expression of that thinking. Mires describes it as a toolkit that Freedom Health created itself, with a common denominator built internally so that external providers can sit on top of it and connect into a unified data environment. The practical value lies in being able to push and pull information securely and in real time between Freedom Health and independent third parties. In his description, the customer sees only the relevant output, while the complex exchange of data happens in the background with far less scope for manual error because it is “systems talking to systems”.
That internal architecture is also what supports product flexibility. Looking back, Mires says one of the biggest lessons from the programme is that the company underestimated the strategic importance of data at the outset. His conclusion is that if the data structure is sufficiently flexible, it becomes possible to accommodate a far wider range of client needs and product permutations than expected. He claims Freedom Health is now able to build a bespoke solution for a single client in less than a week, whereas similar work might once have taken six to eight months. For insurance operations leaders, that is a meaningful statement about product agility, not merely IT efficiency.
Freedom Health did not pursue a conventional off-the-shelf route. Its chosen partner was V88 Limited, a Dorset-based firm selected after a review of multiple vendors. What proved decisive was not geography, though that turned out to be convenient, but approach. Mires says many suppliers wanted Freedom Health to adapt its operating model to a generalised insurance product, typically designed for wider application and often oriented towards motor rather than health.
For Freedom Health, that was a poor fit because health insurance data structures differ materially from those in motor and other mass lines. V88 stood out because it focused first on understanding the problem and then offered to help the insurer “build your own solution”. That was possible because Freedom Health already had an internal IT capability, albeit a small one, with 10 people in-house. Mires argues that co-building gave the insurer more control over the end state and put it in a better position to maintain and develop the platform over time.
This is one of the more interesting strategic choices in the discussion. In a market where many mid-sized insurers are under pressure to modernise quickly, Freedom Health’s approach suggests a preference for controllable modularity over packaged standardisation. That may not suit every carrier, but Mires is clear that for a specialist health insurer, the specificity of the operating model matters.
Mires is equally clear that the work is incomplete. Roughly 10 months into the programme, he estimates the business is only about 30 per cent through the journey, though he believes it is nearing the point where earlier groundwork will start producing more visible gains. He compares the process to building a house: much of the effort goes into foundations that remain unseen until the structure starts rising above ground.
He also offers a caution that will resonate with senior insurance executives: early on, the business became too excited by what technology could do and risked allowing the available tools to shape the problem definition. His phrase for it is memorable: “It was a tail wagging the dog.” He now sees that as a leadership challenge in its own right. The practical lesson, he says, is to stay anchored to the operational problem and not get distracted by the noise of the vendor market and the sheer abundance of solutions.
Mires’s comments on AI are more restrained than much current industry rhetoric. Freedom Health itself, he says, uses very little AI directly, but many of the tools it relies on are AI-enabled in the background, especially in workflow automation. That distinction is important: the value lies less in branding something as AI than in whether it removes routine work and improves service delivery.
He points to practical examples. Staff are spending less time on reports, spreadsheets and drafting emails, and more time speaking to the people they are there to support. In that sense, the company’s automation strategy is explicitly augmentation rather than substitution. Freedom Health has not reduced headcount as a result of these changes; if anything, Mires says, it has grown. The intended effect is to free employees from repetitive tasks so that empathy and judgement remain at the front of the service model.
At the same time, he recognises that healthcare partners are using AI in more visible clinical applications, particularly in dermatology, where image-based tools can help distinguish between severe and minor conditions. The implication is that insurers may not always be direct users of frontier AI, but they will increasingly operate in ecosystems where AI-enabled partners shape the service experience.
Looking ahead, Mires does not place his biggest bet on a single new care pathway or underwriting tool. Instead, he highlights insurance licensing as a major determinant of what international health insurers will be able to do over the next three to five years. The challenge, as he describes it, is that even when an insurer can deliver in one jurisdiction, regulatory differences can affect or slow entry into the next. He sees emerging technology and regulatory development making it easier for insurers to move between regulated environments.
As those barriers evolve, the next stage becomes more meaningful: plugging flexible insurance platforms into increasingly capable health technologies, including software that can help treat or prevent certain conditions. That view is consistent with the rest of his argument. For Mires, the future of health insurance is not a single app or AI tool. It is the interaction between sound data architecture, real-time connectivity, partner ecosystems and the ability to operate across borders.
Away from work, Mires says he is passionate about golf, though with some understatement he notes that the feeling is not entirely mutual. He also speaks about the pressures of a family-owned business, where switching off is difficult because responsibility never feels far away.
As his children move towards university, he says he would like to spend more time giving back to the local community, particularly through the rugby and hockey clubs that supported his son’s development. He does not present himself as a coach, but as someone who could contribute through committee and organisational work. It is a small but telling point: even outside the office, his instinct is towards building structures that help others operate better.
For insurance professionals, Mires’s account offers a useful counterweight to the louder claims often made around transformation. His emphasis is not on disruption for its own sake, but on the mechanics of service delivery: data quality, platform flexibility, real-time exchange, clinical relevance and staff adoption. It is a notably operational view of change, and perhaps a more durable one for that.
