Group risk and health apps are now exploding with digital features enabling employees to access wellbeing solutions from virtually any place and at seemingly any time. This lockdown-boosted surge in innovation is now being backed up with broader support, with insurers spending considerable energy adapting and promoting their propositions to ensure that they are of optimum benefit to tomorrow’s workforces and advisers.
In particular, they are reacting to a realisation that just providing digital features is not enough if there is little actual usage of them. So recent months have seen them increasingly laying on virtual onboarding workshops and seminars to showcase what their offerings can do.
Take-up is proving high. For example, AIG Life reports that 9 out 10 of its top Smart Health clients (by most usage) have accepted the invitation of an onboarding meeting to explain the service in detail.
It is clearly no coincidence that AIG Life’s requests for virtual GP phone or video appointments were 20 per cent higher between January and July 2022 than during the preceding six months. Its mental health counselling with psychologists also increased by 38 per cent during the same period.
David Williams, head of group risk at Towergate Health & Protection, says: “These workshops started becoming more common this year, and we steer our clients towards them because we find that live sessions are much more effective than the PDFs we send. It’s mostly HR staff who attend, but employees can do so as well.
“We join forces with insurers to tailor the sessions in a way that enables clients to get the maximum out of them, looking at client headache points and how best to address them. These workshops can showcase how the apps can help with nutrition and diet as well, and HR can then cascade it onto the rest of the workforce.”
Insurers are also realising the importance of ensuring that engagement is not confined to a one-off event at outset and continues throughout the life of the scheme. To this end there is a conspicuous trend towards launching employer hubs to encourage regular communication with employees.
Chris Morgan, head of group protection distribution at AIG Life, says: “The hubs give employers an excuse to communicate and, although they can be used by all sizes of firm, they can be particularly useful for SMEs. The key message we are asking employers to impart is that employees should actually download the Smart Health app.
“It becomes a reactive tool if they only download it at the point they need it, and they also tend to forget they have it. If it’s already downloaded, usage is likely to increase significantly.”
Other developments
Insurers also commonly point to other enhancements to their digital propositions that have taken place during the last year.
So far in 2022, 30 per cent of Unum’s Help@hand remote GP appointments have seen users opt in to use a new feature, launched this April, which enables them to consent to the GP securely adding the consultation notes to their NHS records via the NHS’s Spine system. Encrypted copies of consultation notes written by the Square Health GP are delivered via an API link to the registered email address of the member’s GP practice.
This January, Unum also introduced the Help@hand Insights Report, providing anonymised insight into employees’ usage patterns of the app’s health and wellbeing services. This allows a look at utilisation by health issue, number of sessions used, gender, age, time of appointment and other factors.
In September, Aviva launched its Mental Health Videos, which enable employees to identify and find out more about common mental health problems, and, last December, Legal & General launched its HR Communication Toolkit, designed to help employers communicate more effectively with employees.
Jo Elphick, marketing director, group protection at Legal & General, says: “We know most smaller businesses won’t have a full-time internal comms person, and this toolkit takes them through the whole planning process. Our research has always shown a clear disparity between how well employers think they are communicating and how well employees think they are being communicated with.”
Notes of caution
But some criticise insurer activity as still being too reactive, and feel that greater investment in engagement is necessary if the workforces of tomorrow are to be encouraged to change their behaviours to focus on prevention.
Kate Whitelock, head of wellbeing at YuLife, says: “Most insurers say they have an EAP or virtual GP service, but the emphasis is on waiting for health issues to arise, and there is still a huge problem with the way we think about prevention. They need to create digital experiences that focus on lifestyle changes, and make people think about movement, sleep and stress.
“Things like the digital games mechanisms we offer really come into play here, helping people embed healthy habits into their everyday lives. I’m not aware of any other providers out there doing this yet. Insurers also need to be better at providing data to help employers understand the health of their workforces and to help assess the impact of their investment.”
Others caution against insurers becoming preoccupied with digital services to the extent that they neglect more traditional forms of contact. For example, not everyone works at desks, so cards and posters in canteens and toilets can still have a major role to play in communicating with manual workers.
The desire of many employees to make a good old-fashioned phone call should also not be underestimated.
Nick Homer, head of market management, corporate risk at Zurich, says: “The phone will always play a big part and will be favoured by the more vulnerable. Somewhat surprisingly, 58% of our client employees prefer to speak to a GP via telephone rather than via video link. But I would expect this to gradually migrate to people wanting to do virtual face-to-face.”
Indeed, by the time Gen Z are dominating most boardrooms, insisting on speaking to a GP by phone will probably seem as outdated as insisting on composing a letter with a typewriter. But, for a generation at least, insurers clearly have to indulge in a careful balancing act.
Digital rehab capabilities provide their worth
Last month Aviva’s group income protection digital rehab capabilities proved crucial for one of Mattioli Woods’ clients that had a senior manager returning to work after being absent with stress-related mental health problems.
The client, a London-based investment manager, found its normal occupational health provider unable to put a package in place as it didn’t have the resources available within the necessary timescale.
Sean McSweeney, employee benefits team director at Mattioli Woods, says: “They hadn’t considered the early intervention service on their group income protection scheme, so we steered them towards this, and they absolutely got the help they needed.
“Aviva’s digital capabilities really came up trumps, especially with regard to accessing therapists via Teams and Skype. The longer a mental health claim takes, the worse it gets. But digital services allow access to therapists more quickly and more efficiently.”
Nevertheless, the fact that it needed an intermediary to highlight that these facilities were actually available illustrates perfectly the engagement challenge insurers are still facing.
