Bupa builds single customer view to personalise healthcare

Bupa has consolidated 90 percent of its customer and health data onto a single platform to personalise healthcare before, during, and after a customer sees a clinician.

The healthcare and insurance company’s Connected Care strategy is using consolidated data to extend personalisation beyond marketing into health management by building a more complete view of individual customers.

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According to Bupa chief data officer, Ed Falconer, this unified view of customer and health data is creating the ability to provide a more predictive model of care.

“Personalisation within Bupa is far broader than just a marketing/targeting story,” Falconer said.

“It is much more about health management and helping customers identify and find the right clinician at the right time and helping them manage themselves against their health needs at that moment in time.”

This strategy is the outcome of a significant evolution for Bupa. By the late 2010s its acquisition-fuelled growth model had led customers to often be connected to multiple data services.

Falconer and his team have since consolidated the company’s data onto a single Databricks-powered platform.

“If you are going to deliver connected care across the products and health services that you provide, you fundamentally need a single source of information and health data relating to the individual, so you can truly offer joined-up health care for your customers,” Falconer said.

The personalisation team now draws on around 1500 data features from the platform to support decisioning across millions of customer touchpoints each year.

The consolidation has also accelerated Bupa’s data and analytics processes, with outcomes now delivered more than eight times faster than three years ago, while many data tasks have shifted from weekly to daily delivery.

Breadth and speed are critical to Bupa’s Connected Care strategy, which is based on personalised care and health plans, and which requires Bupa to respond to different health moments in a customer’s journey. Falconer said this ability would become increasingly important over time.

“I want to be predictive, so that I can actually start guiding a customer to not be unwell,” Falconer said. “Therefore, predictive elements start playing in the heartland of what data can do.

“All of that has a degree of technology, data, and AI capability embedded within it. That is the work that we are doing every single day to get to the point of making sure that we are getting better at creating those moments and experiences for our customers that really help them manage that journey.”

AI will play an increasingly important role in Connected Care. Falconer described one area of focus as being the use of AI to document health plans following consultations, to make them readily accessible to customers and more likely to be followed.

While marketing was not the key driver for personalisation at Bupa, Falconer said the organisation still benefitted through the ability to make personalised service recommendations, such as informing customers when they had an unused benefit, or how to take advantage of Bupa-aligned services.

He said Bupa was also using NPS to measure whether its efforts to better understand customers were translating into improved experiences.

“We want to make sure that we keep increasing our NPS by creating more knowledge and understanding about our customers through data,” Falconer said.

The push towards more personalised and predictive care is also leading Bupa to explore digital representations – or digital twins – of customers, with the goal of presenting health information differently depending on whether it was being used by the customer, a clinician, or the business.

“The first step is very much the data representation of the patient or the customer,” Falconer said.

The strength of Bupa’s data platforms also present significant scope for the introduction of agentic AI, although at this time Falconer said the company was some way from widespread adoption.

“We are approaching it with caution and enthusiasm, but we are not going to be using agentic in the health sphere at this point,” he said.

“Where we see value in agentic is where we can actually control it, contain it, practice it, experiment with it, and do it properly, in our back-office processes.

“We expect it to deliver us a significant amount of productivity gains, but the real work comes back to ‘how you do this properly’.”

Falconer said privacy, governance, and customer consent would always be foundational to the data platform, particularly as Bupa expanded its use of predictive models and AI across sensitive health data.

“Our job is to make sure that when we are starting to scale agentic, we have the foundations absolutely rock solid so that all of these principles around being able to monitor performance, review ethical use, and ensure that we understand costs, are all being monitored and managed in hyper-controlled way.”