Health insurance provider Vitality is deepening its ties with the Google tech ecosystem with the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to help millions of people make better-informed decisions about their health and lifestyle.
Known as Vitality AI, the platform is built using Google Cloud’s AI and data analytics tools, including its fully managed generative AI development platform, Vertex AI, and its AI assistant technology, Gemini.
Google’s technologies are being combined with Vitality’s anonymised health-related and lifestyle datasets to bring the insurance provider’s customers a more accurate understanding of their health and lifespan.
Adrian Gore, founder and group CEO of Discovery Group, which owns Vitality, used the London launch event for its Google-powered AI platform to set out how the data powering the endeavour has been collected and used up to now.
Essentially, a customer buys one of Vitality’s qualifying insurance products, and data about their lifestyle and fitness habits is fed into the Vitality app by their smartwatch or fitness tracker app.
Based on their medical history, the app will make recommendations about what users could do to improve their health, fitness and lifespan, and – if they adhere to these changes – they receive rewards points that can be used to access money-saving deals from Vitality’s partner network.
The company also operates an air miles-style model, whereby users are assigned Bronze status when they first sign up, but – as they accrue points – they can reach higher membership tiers, and benefit from lower excess payments or insurance renewal prices.
From a data collection perspective, Vitality already taps into other Google subsidiaries for this purpose, including health and fitness tracker app and device maker Fitbit, which was acquired by the search giant in 2021.
Furthermore, the partnership will see Vitality increase its existing use of Google’s Health Connect platform, which is used to centralise and synchronise health and fitness data from various apps in the Android device ecosystem.
By forging close ties with Google, and digging into its public cloud arm’s AI and data analytics portfolio, Vitality said it will be able to use this data to give its customers personalised recommendations about the actions they can take to improve their fitness and increase their life spans.
These recommendations could include upping the level of physical activity they do a certain number of times a week, improving their sleeping habits, participating in public health screening programmes and better monitoring any chronic health conditions they suffer with.
“Despite the clear benefits of preventative care, health systems and the insurance market as a whole remain focused on treating illness when it happens,” said Gore.
“Our partnership with Google transforms this. By bringing together Google’s technology and AI capabilities, and our unique data sets and understanding of behaviour change, we will have a never-before-seen capability and understanding of a person’s health, coming together in a way that personalises and empowers millions of people to take control of their health.”
Improving life expectancy
According to Vitality, providing customers with such highly personalised health advice would be a very time-consuming process, because of the amount of data that would need to be ingested and processed. Previous attempts to achieve the same thing sometimes resulted in health advice being generated that was too generic to be of use.
Now, it is claimed that providing this data to its customers will enable them to make more proactive and informed choices about their health, which will – in turn – help improve their life expectancy and reduce their associated healthcare costs.
Maureen Costello, vice-president of the UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa for Google Cloud, said AI has the potential to profoundly transform the way the healthcare market operates: “From accelerating the pace of scientific progress, to enhancing early detection of diseases, improving treatment planning, better supporting healthcare professionals and giving more people the right tools and information to live healthier.”
“By integrating Google Cloud’s advanced AI capabilities, including Gemini models, with Vitality’s data and understanding on driving healthier habits, this partnership poses an exciting opportunity to deliver hyper-relevant healthcare at scale.”
