Dr. Ronald Whelan, CEO of Discovery Health
Photo courtesy of Future of Health
LOS ANGELES – During the Future of Health Annual Summit, Dr. Ronald Whelan, CEO of South Africa's largest health insurer, Discovery Health, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how the organization incentivizes its members to live healthier lives.
MobiHealthNews: Can you tell me about your work?
Dr. Ronald Whelan: I am from a health insurer in South Africa called Discovery Health. We have been in business for the last 32 years. We are the biggest private medical insurer in South Africa.
What we are known for is what we call a shared value model, and a shared value model means that we reward our clients for the right health-seeking behavior. We reward our clients for exercise, and we are very, very excited to now reward our clients for sleep.
So, three weeks ago, we launched a sleep rewards program, which allows our members to be rewarded for sleeping better and for discipline around their sleep.
MHN: What type of rewards do members get?
Whelan: There are a range of weekly rewards that are available for meeting your exercise goal on a weekly basis or your sleep goal on a weekly basis, and then there are more longitudinal rewards for a series of actions, you know, building your healthy habits over time, and those rewards can be travel discounts. There can be discounts on home furnishing across a range of retailers. We have over 50 retail partners as part of our rewards ecosystem. We have an internal miles currency; you can accumulate your rewards in miles currency and use that towards a purchase of a bigger retail item over time.
MHN: Do you use wearables to track this?
Whelan: We do.
We work very closely with our wearable partners: Garmin, Apple, Samsung and Fitbit, and we recently partnered with Oura. So, we have an exclusive partnership with Oura in South Africa, and Oura is great for sleep-tracking.
Through that, we have built up a very interesting dataset. We've got all of the wearable data. We've obviously got all of the claims data being a health insurer, over 60 million life years of claims data, and then we integrated with the pathology ecosystem, so we have got pathology data as well.
