From Ireland to Las Vegas
One of the new start-up company’s attending this year’s InsureTech Connect exhibition in the MGM Grand from the 23rd to the 25th September has made the 3000-mile round trip to connect with Insurers from the U.S., and from around the globe to introduce their innovative technology to the marketplace.
KudosHealth from the west coast of Ireland is attending the event to showcase to potential customers in the insurance sector their innovate concept & technology, they are building a health rewards & incentives ecosystem which allows all the stakeholders in one’s health to participate in incentivising & rewarding the individual for digitally tracking various aspects of the own health on consumer health apps and wearable devices.
The founder of the company Declan Trumble developed the business based on a discovery made while working in the car insurance telematics sector, here he discovered the correlation between well placed strategic rewards & incentives and the improved driving behaviours of young drives, and that financial incentive of a reduced car insurance policy costs, did improve behaviours but this was dramatically increased with the introduction of rewards & incentives.
This also helped strengthen the customers loyalty to the brand, because its only in the weeks before renewal that most people think about, renewals and the possibility of getting a better deal elsewhere for their insurance cover, and we are now it an era where the customer is more lightly to switch providers, we’re providing the insurer a truly unique & positive way to engage the customer through-out the policy cycle, to attract & retain the most profitable customers.
Trumble said “By enabling a collective approach to health promotion the stakeholder’s are reducing their time, costs & effort, associated with promoting health, while also engaging more individuals because we make it simple for individuals to participate, an individual connects their existing health tracking app to the KudosHealth platform, and they are incentivised to use to health apps to improve their own health, focusing on the areas of their health that they want to focus on, and not have to be pressured to participate into participate in any particular event promoted by any single stakeholder”
The real benefits of this concept are that all the stakeholders in one’s health such as Health & Life insurers, an individuals Employer, and the healthcare system they fit into, all want to promote health to the individual to encourage them to live healthier lives. What tends to happen is all these stakeholders are promoting health as a single entity, and this leaves the individual being presented with more health initiatives than they can possibly realistically participate in or receive any long-term health benefits from.
Trumble added “What this means for the individual is that they don’t feel the need, or pressure to participate in every initiative that’s promoted from the various stakeholder’s, because individual can sometimes be faced with the dilemma of trying to participate in everything, so they are not negatively impacted for not participating, they may wonder will my insurance or contribution costs will increase, will I be considered for the next promotion at work, or will I pay more for a hospital visit, we removed all those concerns for the individual”
When individuals do try’s to participate in everything that’s promoted, it leaves the individual unsure as to what they need to be doing to actually improve their health, and they then just end up jumping form one health initiative to the next just to try and please all the stakeholders, and this type of activity is not conducive to helping the individual to form healthy habits around they areas of the health that concerns them the most and that they know they need to improve on.
What we have effectively created is “AirMiles” for health Trumble added, where the individual is rewarded with points for tracking their own health, so if they want to be more physically active, record their sleep to improve their sleeping behaviours, or track their food intake to reduce calories, to help with weight-loss, or just to take more mindfulness sessions to reduce stress, we give the user the autonomy to look after their own health how, when & where they want at their own pace.
In the community, or in the workplaces this allows the stakeholder to get a real-time overview of the aggregated health status of the community or the workplace, they can use this data to see where there in trends in poor sleep or, low levels of physical activity, or spike in areas of high usage of stress apps, where it can then be used to help identify triggers leading to causes of stress, and they can intervene as necessary.
Traditionally using rewards for incentivising individuals to live a healthier lifestyle is nothing new, but by introducing a collective approach reduces cost for stakeholders and provides the user a much wide choice of rewards & incentives to choose from, most rewards based programmes can be fairly limited to a specific number of rewards that are available and don’t offer an incentive that really fits the individual persona of the demographic that they are targeting, and to get really motivated to get healthier you need an incentive that you really want, there’s no point in being restricted to receiving a reward of a set of travel luggage, when you don’t travel, that’s not going to motivate anyone.
The system uses a clever algorithm which is a mechanism to handicap the healthier, more active participants so everyone has a fair chance of achieving rewards, the system also enables continuous competitive activity challenges enabling various organization to participate in challenges against each other in inter-firm challenges keeping the engagement fresh, fun and rewarding opposed to health apps which are often siloed with individual organizations and tend to lose momentum once an individual have complete the full cycle of events, or activities.
Trumble also mentioned “that they’ve also have some very interesting innovative future plans to really disrupt the corporate wellness sector, and potentially the insurance sectors also on the horizon, and what these disruptive technologies will do is give the insurer a new channel for acquiring the healthier customer, both for their consumers & corporate portfolio’s, not to mention the vast amounts of rich aggregated health data that it produces for assisting with more sophisticated pricing engines & risk management software.”
The team is based in the west of Ireland, but have taking the first steps to have a team based on the ground in the U.S. and currently the most lightly location is in Lansing Michigan, because of their participation in the PROTO Insurtech acceleration programme run by LEAP, and program director Tony Willis, where they have provided the company with all the assistance needed to take an international company into the US to conduct business from within the target market.
This program helped the business access the cluster of insurance companies that a based in the Lansing area, they gave them valuable insights into the insurance industry, along with insights into the current and future concerns that insurers are facing in a rapidly changing sector, with may start-ups operating in the insurance space, they are all looking to disrupt the marketplace so proactive & innovate insurers like Michigan’s Farm Bureau & AF Group are continuously looking for partnerships & collaborations with these new and innovate companies so they can stay ahead of the current trends, improve their operational systems and offer the customer the best possible experience.
If you are attending the InsureTech Connect exhibition at the MGM Grand between the 23rd to the 25th September, you can find out more about KudosHealth at Kiosk #K37 or contact them directly by e-mail at declan@kudoshealth.com.