The Power of Integrated Data in Health and Wealth
Yasheen Modi, Deputy Head of R&D at Discovery Employee Benefits
Integrating traditionally siloed benefits solutions across the dimensions of healthcare, retirement, and group life cover into a comprehensive, holistic solution adds multiple layers of value for both staff and employees that is more than a sum of its individual parts.
Speaking at the 2022 EBnet 3-D Virtual Conference, Yasheen Modi, Deputy Head of R&D at Discovery Employee Benefits, described how this integration, coupled with greater digital engagement by employees with the benefits available to them, works to improve employee wellbeing and boost performance and reduce costs in the workplace.
“As integration generates multiple data points across the key dimensions of physical and financial wellbeing at the employee level, it opens the door to deploy modern analytics techniques that enable deeper insights at the employer level,” explains Modi. “These insights, in turn, allow for the identification of trends that enable more effective, targeted, interventions in addition to improved employee engagement with their benefits.”
Deeper Employee Insight
A well-known adage in the world of statistics is that ‘correlation does not imply causation’.
Modi argues that broadly, these advances have allowed insights that are a closer fit to the latter – the ability to infer cause-and-effect relationships between variables, beyond inferences catered for by the former – the ability to identify observed associations between variables.
“Historically, one might have considered the static metrics of diet, time spent exercising, body-mass-index (BMI), age, and blood pressure of an individual and use this to quantify and estimate of mortality risk,” he says. “Today, causal inference allows for a more precise understanding of the degree to which changes in one or more predictive variables will cause a change a change in the dependent variables of interest.”
Simply put: “causal inference becomes more important when you want to predict a change in the outcome variable, given a change in any of the other variables,” adds Modi.
For instance, does a change in exercise behaviour cause a decrease in mortality directly, or is there a closer fit to the changes that exercise will cause in BMI which, in turn, may be a more direct indicator of reduced mortality risk?
The shift in analytic techniques is particularly useful in quantifying the impact of behavioural change, which has broad applicability in the world of Employee Benefits as it leads to solutions that can help inspire employees on the pathways to better physical and financial wellbeing.
During his presentation at the 2022 EBnet 3-D Virtual Conference, Modi hypothesised as follows:
“If exercise leads to a reduction in BMI and that results in a reduction in mortality. How exactly do we quantify that? Once we quantify that, we can associate specific rewards with, for example, losing weight,” explains Modi.
Beyond incentivising behaviours at the individual level, advanced data analysis derived from integrated data sets generates benefits at the employer level, particularly when identifying employer specific workplace changes, or trends, and designing interventions that pre-empt potentially adverse outcomes before they materialise at the workplace.
“For example, if we have health data on group risk members, can we pick up trends such as increasing mental health claims in a specific group?” posits Modi.
“If so, can we then put in place mental health awareness campaigns or offer bespoke benefits within that employer group?”.
Healthy employees are more productive
By encouraging employees to lead healthier lifestyles, through healthy eating, exercising and better sleeping habits, they are more likely to have better future health outcomes and therefore be less likely to take more time off work and are therefore more productive.
Analysis conducted by Vitality UK shows a direct inverse correlation between those who are healthier – as measured by their Vitality Age Gap, which is the gap between their physical age and how well they are – and those who lose more productive days at work.
“If you endeavour to improve your health, your presenteeism – which is a measure of how much time you spend at work but are not present and thus not as productive as you could be – decreases,” says Modi.
Healthy Employees earn more
Discovery analysis shows that members who pursue a healthy lifestyle are more likely to earn more than their unhealthier co-workers.
“Members who remain unengaged with Vitality have an average real salary increase of 1.04% over inflation but the members who became healthy started to engage had an average annualized salary increase of 3.13% to 3.13% over inflation,” says Modi.
“Ultimately as you move up the Vitality status employees tended to start earning higher salaries.”
Employee Engagement
By integrating benefits solutions and providing access to benefits on one ecosystem, employees that seldomly engaged with their benefits scheme in the past are more likely to take an active interest in their benefits.
For instance, data shows that approximately 10% members of retirement funds view their balances as compared to 50% of members who are on both health and retirement offerings – indicative of a five times higher engagement rate with retirement funding.
While data integration allows for value adds through integrated data analysis, integration in and of itself has many further surprising benefits for employee and employers.
Together, improved engagement, improved employee wellbeing and more pro-active, tailored, interventions work to reduce costs while boosting performance at the workplace.
Ultimately, “by virtue of having all of these profit signatures within one holding company, we start to see less volatility in profit, and we can pass some of that back in the form of more efficient pricing to those groups,” concludes Modi.
ENDS
