A Health Data Crisis (and Opportunity) for Businesses

Data, data, data.

We believe we're experiencing a paradigm shift in how businesses deal with health, wellbeing and data.

Indeed, at the recent REBA Congress in 2023, a room full of global HR and Benefits leads told us that 58% of them felt that “improving their use of data to make decisions” was their biggest business priority for2024 (just in front of exploring AI).

At the same time, we see clients experiencing an unprecedented rise in health costs/ insurance premiums, budget cuts across health/ wellbeing and the cost of mental and physical health (which in turn results in absenteeism, burnout and productivity issues).

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Whilst some of our clients (who operate centrally) are able to accurately track data around all of the above – utilising powerful BI tools such as Tableau, Looker and GA to both identify trends, savings and costs mapped to locations, the vast majority do not have the systems in place to track or action this.

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We believe that population health data – physical, mental and social – is invaluable to businesses to drive better business decisions, save costs and, ultimately, help the biggest asset a company can have – its people.  

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How do businesses address this?

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In order to achieve that, we think that five things are needed:

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• Engagement. Everything starts here. In order to get good data, you need good engagement. To get great data, you need ongoing engagement.  Snapshots are good, real-time trends are better.

• Data capture. Surveys (qualitative data) are useful, quantitative data (from wearables and digital products) is better. Combining both, we believe, is the future.  

• Integration. Standalone dashboards are all well and good, but to get real value, clients must have API integrations into their own products to see data in real-time, mapped against their own business divisions, locations and demographics.  

• Consolidation. With most clients offering some or all of ERPs, LMS, EAPs, health insurance apps, meditation audios and mental health apps, solution fatigue is real. Simplifying the solutions for the individual and providing a clearer pathway to the solution they want and need is much needed.

• Privacy. Quite an easy one to ensure from a technological perspective, but it goes without saying that user privacy is paramount.  Anonymised data, privacy by design.

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Each of these topics are monsters, and we’ll be going into more detail on how our clients tackle these issues, and (naturally) how AI is being used for this (and in the battle against health costs more generally).  

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From our side, we’re excited to shortly reveal our powerful new health data analytics tool, lovingly and provisionally entitled JiveJuice (not really – check out CEO Will Turner’s recent LinkedIn post on this), which looks to tackle the above problems, supplementing our powerful, gamified Engage product with real-time health trend data across populations to businesses.

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In the meantime, if you want a chat about data, even if just to chinwag about what we’ve seen, we’re always happy to share (and learn). Feel free to book in a call with the team, here.

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Team GoJoe

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