Can we ‘gamify’ our way to better health?

What’s the weather doing today? The question might seem unrelated to gamifying wellness in insurance but stay with us. 

One of our university professors once said, “If you want to predict the weather, just assume it’ll be the same as yesterday – you’ll be right 70% of the time.” Not bad, I suppose. But imagine if forecasters stopped there. That remaining 30% would leave us soaked at our picnics. Thankfully, they dug deeper, building models based on causes rather than just patterns and feeding them continuous data to improve accuracy over time. Today, forecasts can stretch weeks ahead. But what if knowing a storm was coming meant we could also act to reduce its effects? That would be a shift from predicting the future to actually changing it.

As actuaries, our work is a lot like that of meteorologists. We take historical experience, understanding and expertise, put it in a melting pot with current knowledge, and “predict” the experience we will see on mortality, morbidity and other metrics. Then we often sit back and see if we were right. To date, there has been relatively little focus on acting to change the result, with efforts typically limited to incentive programmes encouraging generally healthy behaviours, often rewarding those who are already engaged in wellness. While this represents a step forward, there remains significant opportunity to move further, rewarding incremental improvements and creating more targeted, personalised incentives.

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