Insurtech Insights 2025 brought together the world’s leading technology innovators, all vying to prove the value of their products.
We wanted to learn more about the health tech promising to further improve the health and wellbeing services available to businesses when they invest in Group Health Insurance and other health and wellbeing policies.
With lanyards at the ready, we entered the Intercontinental London at The O2…
The women’s health app developed by an Oscar-winner
It’s not every day you get to speak to an Academy Award winner-turned women’s health innovator.
But Chen Mao Davies, CEO and Founder of Anya, is exactly that. She previously worked as a computer scientist helping create visual effects for major Hollywood films. Her movie career reached an unsurpassable peak when her work helped films Blade Runner 2049 and Gravity both win a Bafta and Oscar for best visual effects.
Chen’s unlikely career switch came after experiencing breastfeeding, postnatal depression, and new parenthood challenges and discovering the level of support available was inadequate.
“I found it very hard to access any support from midwives, doctors or health visitors because they don’t work around the clock and the NHS is very stretched,” said Chen. “I found it very hard to find any evidence-based digital support. So I decided to set up the business called Anya, which is named after my daughter.”
Anya is a women’s health app that combines AI technology and human specialists to provide 24/7 healthcare and companionship during a women’s health journey including fertility, pregnancy, parenting, menopause, and menstrual health.
“It is like a healthcare professional downloading her brain and uploading it to AI,” she says.
“You can ask any questions and get practical and emotional support from the Anya AI chatbot. And when they want to talk to a specialist, they can simply talk to them within the chatbot. Our team of healthcare professionals all get push notifications when someone’s calling and one of them will come to the chatbot to talk to you.”
Anya also offers personalised content & self-care plans, 1-2-1 video consultations, webinars, virtual drop-ins, and peer support communities.
The app has been widely adopted by the NHS, serving 7.2m people in the UK and won the National AI Awards for Healthcare 2024.
The API that unites health data from wearables and apps
People are collecting more and more health data. One study found that more than a third of American adults use a health app or fitness tracker of some description. UK surveys draw similar conclusions.
However, data is usually housed on different platforms and is not joining up, particularly when it comes to wearable health tech.
Michael Economou from Terra API, told me how they are unifying health data from different sources onto a single platform.
“Everything you can imagine is on the Terra API,” said Michael. “We’ve already integrated with hundreds of wearable devices like Apple Watch, Garmin etc, sensors like Continuous Glucose Monitoring and health apps like Strava, MyFitnessPal and so many more.”
From this, he says, it’s possible to gain a more accurate picture of an individual’s health and wellbeing. It also provides the basis for creating more tailored gamified health and wellbeing challenges and rewards, relevant to groups or individuals.
“This data can be used to drive better engagement through gamification and drive healthy behaviours. It’s very important for health insurance companies to have positive touch points with their customers, and this helps increase that.”
He also sees it as part of the preventative health model.
“Employee gamification elements helps keep people healthier, that means absences are reduced and productivity is increased. And this is being done through very simple steps, for example by promoting physical activity, better sleep and better nutrition.”
Retinal scanning that sees beyond eye health
Retinal scans have long been used by ophthalmologists to diagnose and monitor eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. But their potential use goes deeper than that.
Benny C. Y. Zee has a PhD in Biostatistics and is Founder and CEO of Health View Bioanalytic. His company uses retinal imaging technology combined with AI and machine learning to assess the risk of a series of ailments early, including: depression, diabetes, dementia and schizophrenia.
“We discovered that the accuracy of our technology is significantly higher than other deep learning methods when we were working on stroke risk assessment,” said Benny. “We founded the company after our US patent was granted, and started working on various other health indications.”
The key here, he says, is early intervention:
“If you can intervene early things are much easier to treat and manage, rather than waiting for it to get serious,” said Benny. “This is true with both physical and mental health issues.”
Incentivising wellness: the gamification revolution
YuLife’s Kate Whitelock hosted a “fireside chat” between YuLife Founder & CEO, Sammy Rubin, and MetLife’s SVP & General Manager, Dominic Grinstead.
The two companies recently joined forces on a new Group Income Protection solution combining YuLife’s gamification technology with MetLife’s traditional insurance model.
Sammy is a powerful advocate of the power of transforming health and wellness into a game-like experience, where people get rewarded for achieving certain milestones.
He realised the potential of gamifying health when observing the large numbers of people he would see playing games on their phones during idle moments. If we are to improve people’s health, he figured, we need to be where they are and give them games that incentivise healthy habits.
Dominic from Metlife mentioned that 2.8m people are currently on disability benefits, which is 800,000 more than before the pandemic. Mental health and musculoskeletal disorders currently top the list of driving factors.
Like Sammy, he discussed the importance of early intervention – a common theme amongst the health technologists we spoke to.
Is this the future of health insurance?
In recent years, the added value services offered on health insurance plans have gone from a nice to have, to a core part of many policies. Our team of consultants keep up-to-date with all the latest services included on Group Health Insurance plans, and ensure our clients are fully informed about them. Insurtech Insights 2025 proved that more innovations could be on the way, particularly in the area of preventative care.
For Engage Health Group, the conference was an early sight of some of the technologies that could find their way onto Company Health Insurance, Income Protections plans and other employee health and protection policies in the near future.
If you need help arranging and implementing health insurance, life insurance or other employee benefits policies, then contact our award-winning team for personalised advice, bespoke strategies and market-wide quotes. Call 01273 974419 or [email protected].
