Combining data with cloud computing is often a powerful tool to drive business innovation. What if this is used to improve people’s health on a global scale?

Insurer Generali S.P.A. and health management program Vitality Group have developed a data-driven online platform that actionizes data for insurance members to live a healthier lifestyle — and get rewarded for doing so.

It is a wellness loyalty program that presents data to end users for the purpose of helping them assess health status, set individual goals, and synchronize with a digital platform to optimize good habits. This technology is supported by Accenture PLC and built on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Generali Vitality is a pretty simple concept,” said Simon Guest (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Generali Vitality GmbH. “It’s a program that you have on your phone … it’s a wellness coach for you as an individual, it’s going to help you to understand your health, and it’s going to take you on a journey to improve your lifestyle and your wellness, and hopefully help you to live a healthier and a more mindful life.”

Guest and Nils Müller-Sheffer (pictured, left), managing director and cloud-first application engineering lead for the European market at Accenture PLC, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. They discussed how Generali Vitality leverages data and the cloud to improve people’s lives and the insurance business, the challenges of developing the system in different countries, and the future of the program. (* Disclosure below.)

Rewards improve engagement

When enrolled in the program, members are invited to go through a health assessment, which asks how they live, what they eat and how they sleep. Then, the system gives them their Vitality age, which is a sort of actuarial comparison with their real age.

As many illnesses and deaths are related to bad lifestyle habits, such as poor nutrition, smoking and drinking alcohol, and not exercising, a large part of the program aims to help people have better habits and move more, according to Guest. Therefore, the program actionizes challenges based on data to improve these aspects and rewards them with economic prizes or discounts at major brands, such as Adidas, Amazon and Garmin.

“It’s not about being an athlete; it’s about getting off the underground one station earlier and walking home or making sure you do your 10,000 steps a day,” Guest explained. “And what we see is that 40% of our customers are regularly linking either their phone or their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how much they are exercising.”

Cloud enables solutions across different countries

Generali Vitality is present in five European countries — Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — and has expansion plans. Although geographically close to each other, the countries are very diverse. So, the idea was to develop a consistent product and customer experience that could be replicated across multiple markets, according to Guest. This is where Accenture and AWS come in.

“When we started the journey, it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets, have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets,” Müller-Sheffer explained. “But then also have the opportunity to localize different languages, [and] there’s different reward partners in the different markets.”

In addition to standardization, the platform needed to work in a very simple way. There isn’t a large IT team behind Generali Vitality that can act as backbone support, so it needed a solution that works on autopilot, according to Müller-Sheffer.

“We specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using, for example, managed database services with automatic backup, with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically, that has all this built-in, which, usually, maybe a database administrator would take care of,” Müller-Sheffer said.

While the program benefits customers by helping them improve their health habits and distributing rewards, it also creates value for the insurer itself. The program changes the way people view and engage with insurance, reduces claims as customers get healthier, ​​and allows the insurer to use the data to understand its markets.

“We need to be able to take the data that we have out of the Vitality Program and interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance product we have,” Guest concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: This segment was sponsored by Accenture PLC. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE