Dr Keith Klintworth: Why it's time to 'triple down' on prevention
With demand for healthcare services showing no signs of easing and the economic burden of ill-health continuing to grow, Dr Keith Klintworth, Managing Director VitalityHealth explains how a truly effective approach to prevention lies in an end-to-end healthcare journey that’s threefold.
We’ve long known that prevention is better than the cure.
Vitality’s annual Health Claims Insights Report helped prove it, highlighting the positive impact of a preventative approach to healthcare. Not only when it comes to improving outcomes, but also by reducing healthcare costs and ultimately helping people live longer in better health.
And whilst prevention has always been in Vitality’s DNA, we’ve seen the rest of the health insurance market as well as the government put more focus on it in recent times.
“Prevention is an area where insurers can really lead the way” – Dr Keith Klintworth, Managing Director, VitalityHealth
Indeed, prevention, which has been repeatedly mentioned by the Health Secretary as a key priority for ‘fixing the NHS’, is expected to feature prominently in the 10-year plan for the NHS published in Spring 20251.
The challenge, however, will be delivering adequate funding and despite the large sums of money being promised to the NHS, actual health spending on prevention currently represents around only 2% of the NHS England budget2.
The evolving role of health insurance
As private medical insurance (PMI) products continue to evolve and given growing public demand, there is a huge opportunity for our industry to not just double down on prevention, but ‘triple down’ on it in a truly transformative and joined up way.
This means understanding that for it to be effective, it must be about more than just promoting wellbeing or offering clients a few benefits like therapies or gym membership. Or just raising awareness about wellbeing.
A truly preventative approach to healthcare needs to start with enabling people to make healthier lifestyle choices – but must also go much further; through clinical screening and early intervention, as well as support during and after treatment to help avoid reoccurrence.
By ‘tripling down’, we mean focusing on three stages of prevention – primary, secondary and tertiary – and each is critical to the whole end-to-end healthcare journey.
Primary prevention - managing lifestyle risk factors
With 88% of preventable disease in the UK down to lifestyle-related factors, such as lack of exercise, poor nutrition and mental ill-health3, helping people to lead healthier lives is key to unlocking better healthcare outcomes over time.
Most of us know that we might need to do more exercise, eat better, cut down on our alcohol intake or quit smoking. The challenges we often face though are in making those positive lifestyle changes and making them become a habit.
We know that it takes a sophisticated combination of nudges and incentives to change people’s behaviour for the better and sustain it. That’s why we give our members access to the Vitality Programme, the world’s largest behaviour change programme linked to insurance.
As our claims report highlighted, we’re seeing this approach pay off and resonate more with customers, who increasingly believe insurers should help them to get healthier outside of making a claim.
Through engagement in the Vitality Programme members record a 13% increase in physical activity and a 20% improvement in diet. This is leading to 28% lower healthcare costs for our highly engaged members and an increase in life expectancy of almost five years4.
Secondary prevention - intervening earlier
With healthcare systems generally investing more heavily in treatment and secondary care, sometimes at the expense of earlier clinical interventions, prevention – through screening – is an area where health insurers can really lead the way.
This is less about preventing the onset of disease, but more about driving better healthcare outcomes when someone does fall ill, through a range of effective diagnostic and early intervention services.
When it comes to lifestyle health factors, annual health MOT checks help give members a clearer, more accurate picture of their health, alerting them to any areas that may need improvement.
These checks can also help to challenge our inherent optimism bias. We often think we’re healthier than we are and under-report lifestyle risks, something we see in our own data. Whereas the results from a health check don’t lie.
Meanwhile, more in-depth Health Assessments can play a crucial role in disease management and identification. In some cases, it can even save lives, as James’s story attests to.
Even simple online tools can be effective. In 2023 Vitality launched a new online Cancer Risk Assessment, which so far has seen over 14,000 members use, with around 10% directed to appropriate onward screening services3.
Tertiary prevention – wellbeing support during and after treatment
Central to what we’re developing at Vitality is a complete end-to-end healthcare proposition, which can support the member through their whole healthcare journey and stand more chance of living in the best possible health.
For those that are diagnosed with an illness, such as heart disease or cancer, or living with a chronic condition like diabetes, it’s important that as well as treating the condition, we address their overall health and wellbeing.
Aside from reducing the likelihood of a claim arising in the first place, an individual being in good health will also have a big impact on the success of treatment outcomes for those who do need to undergo treatment.
Improving someone’s baseline health, as part of a broad package of holistic treatment can drive significant wellbeing benefits linked with treatment and rehabilitation.
A good example of this lies in Vitality data. A study of our members in South Africa revealed that those who were more active before a cancer diagnosis were 48% more likely to survive breast cancer than those who were not active - 53% higher for those with prostate cancer3.
It can also help support outcomes for individuals going through cancer treatment too, which is why we launched our Cancer Support Programme in 2022. Members going through chemotherapy are offered fitness and wellbeing support, alongside dedicated case management to help improve the chances of a positive treatment outcome.
Patients enrolled on the programme between 2023 and 2024 saw a 32% reduction in stress and anxiety, a 30% increase in physical activity and a 12% improvement in their overall quality of life, all of which supports their chances of recovery3.
Ultimately, the solution lies in recognising the impact that a preventative based approach can have both on the individual and the general health of our nation as a whole. By embedding prevention at every stage of the healthcare journey, we can ensure our members remain in good health for longer and get the right holistic support when they need it – before, during and after treatment.
Where to next?
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Prevention is about more than wellbeing
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With rising numbers of people living with long-term health conditions, we must prioritise the prevention of illness to offset unprecedented healthcare demand. But it needs to be about more than just promoting healthy living, writes Dr Keith Klintworth, Managing Director VitalityHealth.
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'Prevention is in our DNA'
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Given high demand and rising claims incidence, embedding prevention into private medical insurance (PMI) is helping to manage costs and deliver better health outcomes, writes VitalityHealth Distribution Director Athos Rushovich.
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What is a habit and why does it matter?
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By applying an understanding of behavioural economics, we can be much more effective in helping people to make positive lifestyle choices and form healthy habits that last.
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Insights hub
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Our Insights Hub brings your our range of adviser content - from video series to articles & blogs.
1 Government takes first steps to fix the foundations and save the NHS - GOV.UK
2 NHS funding has to translate into improvements the public can see - The Health Foundation
3 Global Burden of Disease database; Williamson, E., Walker, A. J., Bhaskaran, K. J., Bacon, S., Bates, C., Morton, C. E., ... & Cockburn, J. (2020)
4 VitalityHealth Claims Insights Report 2024