MassMutual connects to wearables

November 6, 2023 6:33 AM

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company announced eligible policyholders can access a variety of tools, launched under its Health and Wellness Program, which focuses on providing insights on healthier living behaviors.

Adam Fox, MassMutual's head of distribution technology & data science, spoke with Digital Insurance about the main objective of the program.

Fox provides overall technology support for the marketing and distribution organizations at MassMutual. He is also responsible for enterprise wide-data science efforts.

Fox said: "We're focused on bringing to market a suite of products and services that really help our policyholders to live longer, happier and healthier lives. We're casting a broad net looking at a variety of emerging technology and new data sources, new types of services that we can review, screen and test. Then when appropriate, scale across our policyholders."

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

DI: What are the main objectives of the Health and Wellness Program?

Fox: We want our policyholders to live longer, healthier lives. Presumably, our policyholders want to live longer and healthier lives as well, certainly as one of them, I do.

We really have this almost pinwheel of prosperity, where we can make investments with products and services that support our policyholders in that endeavor. By doing so, we will help our policyholders to live longer and be healthier, which reduces claims and ensures that for some of our products, our policyholders are paying premiums longer. That brings more money into the system which can be reinvested either by paying a better dividend or through investing in more health and wellness or other related products, which in turn, has this reinforcing effect again to bring more products and services like this into the market. Our approach to this has really been to cast a wide net across what you think of as the health tech space. There's a lot out there and, as in the startup community everywhere, some of it is exceptional and interesting and potentially paradigm shifting. And there are other aspects of it that are not.

We see the role that we can play as using the resources we have as a large company with a great deal of data to go out there to investigate these companies to sort of separate the high quality from the lower quality and then begin running pilots to test the efficacy and the appropriateness of some of these different offerings, and then where appropriate, bring them at scale to our policyholders.

DI: What was behind the discussion to partner and deploy these pilot programs?

Fox: In some cases, we look at the source of claims. So we really try to understand what it is that's driving claim behavior. Cancer was one of the top ones where in some cases, cancers are detected too late, or really have not been at all. So we had a strong belief that if we could detect those cancers earlier, we would give our policyholders opportunities to get treatment earlier and early treatments can lead to much better outcomes. That's for example, why we were really interested in engaging with Grail, which is an early cancer detection organization.

The other bigger bucket are things like heart disease and diabetes. So some of that is, you know, there's mixes of behavioral intervention you can do but then there's also sort of some genetic predisposition that, through our research we became aware of, and so that's really where the two other main pilots came out of.

The first being the genetic screening, they won't tell you have cancer, just that you may be at a higher likelihood, and then as well as higher risks for things like diabetes and heart disease. And the thinking there was well if we can help make people aware earlier, where they can work with their doctors either to look at behavioral changes, diet and exercise, or medication changes potentially for people who may let's say be at a higher risk or high blood pressure than again, they can be more proactive in their health and take more action earlier on to help themselves long term. And then that also informed what we're doing now with our WELL Rider, which again, is trying to drive behavioral change, and reward people for making healthy decisions. And in doing so, looking to reduce future claims and future, you know, ailments and disease by helping people, exercise earlier, sleep better and take care of themselves.

DI: How do you advise policyholders on those behavioral changes? How does the technology work?

Fox: We have the LivingWELL by MassMutual app. It's available on Android and iOS. That's an app where you can sync it with many different devices, Oura rings, Apple watches and so on. You can earn points by sleeping well and by exercising. There's a number of different metrics there. And you can actually earn back a percentage of your premium every month.

Then we have some other programs like the Genomics and GRAIL programs, those are not fully integrated yet, although we hope for them to be. But today, there's kind of separate marketing and information that we provide to policyholders. The reason why those two programs are separate today is really about data privacy. So of course, if we're providing you information for your premium on your premiums, we need to know that you are taking 10,000 steps a day or whatever it might be, so we can provide you with those cash rewards. But when it comes to GRAIL and the genetics screening, we have a lot of concerns about data privacy for those programs. We certainly appreciate that policyholders may have those same concerns. And so we never see that data. And so we really have that wall up. So we can pay for those tests, but the company providing those tests bills us directly, so we have no idea who is involved and who's not involved. We would love to make that a more integrated experience in the future. But of course, there's a lot we would have to think through and how we can do that in a way that will protect people's privacy.

DI: How does data privacy fit into this conversation and how are you keeping customer information safe?

Fox: We went through a lot of effort, first of all, doing deep reviews with all the vendors we partner with. So [we spoke with them about], what's your data infrastructure look like? What's your cybersecurity look like?

We did a lot of research on the contractual side as well. So, for example, we didn't want any of these companies to be able to use this data for research or other purposes without explicit consent from the individual. We told people really explicitly these parties will have access to your data. It would be the test providers, the people who kind of need to be involved to actually process these tests. But we are MassMutual. We don't even know we are marketing these tests to you. We don't know who clicks the link. We don't know who signs up. We get back some very broad aggregate statistics so we know 30 men between 40 and 45 took this test and that's all we know.

We really put in place kind of best in class privacy, so that we still get some rolled up aggregate information, but we don't get any details whatsoever.

On the wearables side, we do need information to actually issue payments and things like that. But we took a data minimization approach to that. Really, meaning we collect the minimum amount that is needed to service that policy and no more. And again, we offer a lot of transparency through the app so you can see exactly what's being collected. When you sign up, we're very explicit on the different metrics we're going to look at as part of the program. And again, we're not going to pull every single thing off of your phone that we could get, we're only going to take these specific elements which we need to in order to pay the rebates.

The responses actually have been startling, I'll say for me. When we first rolled out this genetic screening in June of 2022, our goal was to get 750 people to take these genetic tests. We had to shut off the marketing after two weeks because we had hundreds of people very quickly sign up and so we actually never made it through our full marketing list because we were rolling it out in waves, and it was just too much and we actually shut it down. I really think that speaks to what is a bit of an unmet desire in the market for this type of information. That's really what's driven us to do this next phase with Genomics, which we're launching later this year. It will offer the [genetic] test to many more policyholders. I think there are many out there who have reservations and I fully appreciate those reservations. My hope is that over time, as people see this is being rolled out and they hear about it from their friends and neighbors, their colleagues, and the value that they got from those tests that they in turn would be willing to do it.

DI: What is the future of wellness initiatives at MassMutual?

Fox: You can almost think of it as a funnel, where any policyholder would come in and there would be essentially a screening process and that screening process might involve things like a questionnaire, it would certainly involve any underwriting data that you already submitted as part of your underwriting process. The goal would be to tailor a program for you as an individual so for example, if you were a healthy 30-year-old who didn't smoke and had no family medical history of cancer, putting into a cancer prevention program is probably unnecessary at age 30. But if you let's say had a family history of cancer or family history of diabetes or heart disease, there may be specific programs that we will want to enroll you in. So we think about the health program as something for everybody. We want to make sure it's tailored based on your personal and family medical histories to really design a program that is geared towards you to help you live that longer and healthier life. We want you to think about your sleep, your diet, your mental health, particularly about topics like social isolation as people get older.

And so we also really want to [ask] what does health mean to you? I think for different people that can really mean different things. And so really, our desire is to build a menu of options, so to speak, that is based on your interest and your personal medical background or family medical background, built into your own personalized path.

DI: How does data and technology play a role in those initiatives?

Fox: We see millions of people and we see their health data so we can really use that to better tailor treatments. So we can say, 'Hey, someone who came through MassMutual, 20 years ago, who looks like you, these were their outcomes. And so these are the things we can help you look at.'

I think technology can really help us with accessibility. And by that I mean building simple, intuitive, easy experiences, so that if we recommend a test, or we recommend some type of intervention, whether it be exercise or any other types of things, we can provide apps and experiences that you can access readily. Whether you're a data literate millennial or someone who's older who doesn't like technology, necessarily, we want to build experiences that everyone can really access.

I think technology has a key role to play in making this program easy, intuitive, and simple. We don't want this to be hard, we think that if it is hard for people, they won't do it as with anything else. It's seamless and easy and not something you have to really consciously think about day to day.