The integrated digital healthcare revolution – Empowering insurers with wearable and big data

This is the second post in my series about the global shift to integrated healthcare, last time I talked about taking the burden away from general hospitals with an integrated digital healthcare model, and this week I’ll be looking at how wearable and big data are helping to nudge the needle, particularly for insurance companies.

Insurance organisations play a leading role in the integrated healthcare ecosystem, especially in countries where private healthcare is dominant and/or helping to pick up the slack where public systems are starting to buckle underneath immense pressure.

Despite increasing demand for healthcare services, insurance companies (like any other private sector organisation)  are striving to refine their value propositions, managing lower profit margins and searching for growth opportunities, whilst meeting the innovation imperative, maintaining regulatory compliance and responding to an evolving market.

Consider for a moment the potential of the data that wearable devices, like smartwatches, health monitors, pedometers and activity trackers, produce. With unprecedented access to information about individual’s vital signs, eating habits, well-being and exercise patterns insurance companies could develop even-more personalised services to support people when they become unwell, but also, help prevent diseases and improve overall wellbeing.

Insurance organisations such as The Vitality Group already incentivise members to use mobile and wearable devices to prove that they are making healthy food choices, exercising and sleeping well to receive discounts on their policy and other health and well-being boosting rewards.

Creating outcome-based personalised insurance programs makes sense. It allows insurers to offer cheaper products for people who exercise and eat healthily, and more expensive ones to those who don’t. They can also then use this information to build a better relationship with their customers to market to them and similar consumers, more successfully.  This level of personalisation creates customer intimacy and stickiness like never before.

Consumer personalisation is a very valuable tool in an industry considered by many as being close to commodity-status. According to research from Strategy Meets Action (SMA), a Boston-based research advisory firm for the insurance industry, another 22% of insurance firms are in the process of developing a strategy for using wearable data.  

Similarly, the broader sharing of content throughout the healthcare eco-system, is key to insurers clarifying brand voice, increasing loyalty, enhancing customer experiences and increased revenues. Insurers rely on data-analytics to evaluate and assess business risk, and the insight given by unstructured data from wearables (due to its volume, velocity and variety) provides valuable protection.

But in order to tap into this value, for the benefit of their businesses and the general public, they’ll need to ensure they harness it properly. According to IDC, 90% of all digital information is currently unstructured – locked in a variety of formats, locations and applications made up of separate repositories.

Content management solutions, integrating Electronic Health Records (EHRs), can help insurance organisations to collate and structure all this raw data in a logical and usable format, creating a single view of the patient. By doing so the risks of miscommunication and lost paperwork are dramatically reduced, saving time and money and of course improving the customer/patient experience.

From a Population Health Management standpoint, the security of having one patient record will improve the efficiency of preventative programs such as early population screening for chronic diseases such as breast cancer. From the perspective of Insurance organisations, having electronic health information as well as lifestyle data, can help at looking more meaningfully at the needs of citizens with specific conditions and ultimately encourage keeping people healthier longer, whilst providing economic benefits in terms of more attractive costs.

This level of deep information, including real-time data also creates a useful data lake style of link between Healthcare, Insurance and life–science organisations, but we’ll discuss this more next week.

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