Vitality Active Rewards 2020 Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2020 - Winner

Globally each year 15 million people die prematurely due to chronic conditions that could be ameliorated through the practice of healthy lifestyle behaviours. The WHO estimates in 2017, 14% of the global burden of disease was attributed to mental health disorders potentially preventable through lifestyle behaviours. The objective of Active Rewards 2020 is to help policyholders live healthier lifestyles and benefit both themselves and improve the insurer’s risk portfolio. The Vitality program incentivizes individuals for reaching personalized weekly activity goals. Research shows sustained improvements in physical activity: 2018 study by RAND Europe suggests participation is associated with an increase in total tracked activity of about 33 percent. Given this impact we want to evolve into other areas of health and wellbeing. Changing behaviour and promoting healthy lifestyles is not easy. A combination of clinical rigor, behavioural science and clever design is required. Vitality has created a personalized and digital behaviour change platform, focused on creating healthy habits, that offers effective interventions and incentives for eating better, sleeping better, exercising more and managing mental health. The programme recommends and tracks lifestyle and health related goals on a weekly basis and uses an engaging gamified rewards structure combined with timely notifications and other tracking tools to keep members engaged. This innovation has involved Research and Development, Actuarial, User Experience and Technology teams. Industry players attempting similar things. However, there are no intelligent incentive structures underpinning these programmes; nor is there consideration for the behavioral elements linked to behaviour change.