While the legacy version continues to run in parallel during the transition phase, Atom Pro is being scaled up gradually. The result is a mobile-first system. Apart from empowering swift insurance product launches, it streamlines policy issuance and sales workflows, reduces turnaround time, improves data quality through real-time validation, and provides agents with instant visibility into business performance—while compressing product rollout timelines from weeks to days. FE FUTECH speaks with Mukesh Sharma, CDTO, Star Health Insurance.
Edited Excerpts
Why did Star Health choose to build Atom Pro entirely in-house?
We believed that no external partner could understand the complexity of our business as deeply as we do. Domain expertise has always been a strong in-house capability, so our strategy was to complement it by bringing in technology talent that could immerse itself in our ecosystem for an extended period.
We deliberately deployed new engineers to work on the legacy systems for nearly six months, allowing them to experience the realities of compliance, security, performance, and user-experience challenges first-hand. Once they fully understood these complexities, it became far more effective for them to re-architect and solve the problems with the right long-term vision. This approach would have been difficult to execute through external partnerships alone.
While the core foundation and intellectual property have been built in-house, we are open to leveraging external partners for developing modular, discrete components. Even in those cases, ownership of the IP remains with us. Technology is central to our long-term business strategy, and we therefore wanted to keep the core innovation as close to the organization as possible.
Give a comparative view of an AI-enabled Atom Pro platform and a monolithic, non-AI digital platform. How have things changed? Also, how are agents reacting to Atom Pro?
We are currently in the adoption phase, gradually increasing volumes and load on Atom Pro while the legacy application continues to run in parallel.
Early feedback from the market—both from agents and our internal sales teams—has been extremely positive. Users are comfortable procuring business on the new platform, and several clear advantages are already visible. From a security standpoint, Atom Pro significantly strengthens how customer data is handled. In addition, the platform is fully aligned with regulatory requirements, with all new regulatory features first being deployed on Atom Pro.
The platform has been designed with the clear understanding that agents and sales teams operate primarily in the field. As a result, the UI and UX follow a mobile-first approach rather than a traditional desktop-centric design. Atom Pro is built as a single hybrid application optimized for mobility, ensuring ease of use for agents on the ground.
Many legacy challenges have also been addressed—ranging from performance, scalability, and report downloads to real-time business visibility. Agents can now see daily business performance, track progress toward tier qualification, and leverage a newly introduced renewal module that enables timely customer engagement, improved offerings, and higher policy persistence.
How far has Atom Pro been able to enable Star Health to launch more insurance products?
Atom Pro was conceptualized with the objective of simplifying and accelerating new insurance product launches. Traditionally, launching a product required extensive development effort across multiple systems, particularly around product configuration and underwriting.
With Atom Pro 2.0, one of our key goals was to eliminate most of this development dependency. While product configuration and underwriting are still essential, they are now configuration-driven rather than code-driven.
Any complex product that is configured in the backend product configurator can be rolled out on Atom Pro 2.0 in under a week—typically two days for configuration, followed by SKU setup and formal sign-off. This has dramatically reduced time-to-market and increased our agility in responding to business opportunities.
How have you made the Atom Pro platform compliant with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA)?
We have partnered with a leading provider to implement a centralized consent manager, which is a critical requirement under DPDPA. Additionally, we have transitioned from siloed applications to a platform-based approach by introducing a micro-component called the ‘checkout’.
Customers can reach the checkout through multiple channels, and its purpose is to provide a transparent transaction review—clearly outlining what is being purchased, including proposal details, insured members, date of birth, and KYC information.
The checkout acts as a single point of consent across the ecosystem. Whether the customer interacts via Atom Pro, other customer-facing apps, partner portals, or agent applications, consent is always captured consistently at this layer. By integrating the consent manager at this single point, we ensure uniform compliance across all applications. This initiative is currently in progress and continues to evolve.
What is the team composition for the Project Management Office (PMO) that worked on Atom Pro?
Ahead of the Atom Pro initiative, we made a deliberate investment in building strong technology talent, primarily hiring from the startup ecosystem. Domain expertise in insurance already existed internally, so the focus was on bringing in engineering and product skills.
We established a new development center in Gurugram and scaled our existing centers in Pune and Chennai. These teams initially worked on legacy systems for over six months purely as a learning exercise, gaining a deep understanding of the health insurance ecosystem and regulatory environment in India.
Once aligned, the teams built Atom Pro and its underlying micro-components. Each micro-component was typically handled by a small team of three to four developers, designed to solve specific problems at enterprise scale. At peak, the core transformation team comprised around 35 members.
Recognizing the complexity of the initiative, we also instituted strong governance. Senior leaders with a deep understanding of both business and delivery were inducted into the PMO to ensure effective coordination across locations. Since the project was executed entirely in-house, there were no external partner dependencies, enabling faster decision-making and execution.
Given the complexity of building Atom Pro in a highly regulated insurance environment—especially with AI in the mix—how did you approach software development and continuous improvement?
From a software development lifecycle perspective, our approach is fundamentally agile. We operate in sprint cycles, but with flexibility to adjust cadence based on business priorities rather than treating sprints as rigid constructs. This keeps the model adaptive and outcome-focused, rather than waterfall-driven.
Our CI/CD pipelines are fully automated, using industry-standard tools such as Jenkins. The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services and leverages a containerized deployment architecture built on Kubernetes, pods, and microservices.
Security is embedded throughout the lifecycle through a DevSecOps approach. Automated security scanning tools continuously audit the codebase, and no release moves to production without meeting defined security benchmarks. In addition, every critical release is independently reviewed and approved by our in-house Information Security team.
This integrated approach—agile delivery, automation, and built-in security—allows us to move fast while maintaining compliance and trust in a heavily regulated industry.
At a broader level, as Atom Pro begins to see adoption across the organization, what benefits are already becoming visible?
Since Atom Pro is still in the adoption phase, it would be premature to directly attribute overall business growth or topline impact solely to the platform at this stage. Much of the business continues to operate on earlier versions.
Several tangible benefits are already evident. One of the most significant improvements is in turnaround time—the time taken to process and accept policies has reduced meaningfully on the new platform.
Another major gain is data quality and regulatory compliance. Because Atom Pro was built in-house, we have been able to introduce strong validation controls at the point of data capture. For example, if an incorrect document is uploaded—such as a mark sheet instead of an Aadhaar card—the system immediately flags the error. Previously, such issues were often discovered much later, resulting in delays, rework, and additional customer follow-ups.
These improvements in processing speed, data accuracy, and operational efficiency are already visible. As adoption scales across the organization, we expect these benefits to translate into broader and more measurable business outcomes.
