Bupa Creates a Healthier and More Innovative Data Ecosystem With Snowflake

Since 1947, Bupa has supported the general public with the very best healthcare available. Nearly eight decades on, the company continues to focus on people-centric care and remains a mutual organization that reinvests all profits back into the business to keep delivering the best services to patients.

One thing has changed though: The role of data is more important than ever before. To successfully deliver connected care and accomplish its ambition to become the most customer-centric healthcare company in the world, Bupa needed a new data platform to gain essential customer and care insights.

It turned to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to transform analytics throughout all its operations including, actuarial work, clinical processes, customer experience and contact center — and make the most of innovative AI use cases to create a happier, healthier population.

“We’ve been a customer-centric organization since the very beginning,” explains Kirk Bradley, Director of Customer Service at Bupa. “Over time though, we realized that issues with our data platforms were preventing us from truly achieving our potential and delivering the best customer experiences possible.”

As a large organization with multiple business units, Bupa had siloed data across its healthcare, insurance, dental, care services and health services teams that created several issues. Compute bottlenecks slowed down essential reporting, analysts and data scientists weren’t empowered to focus on new data products, and contact center teams couldn’t quickly identify customers who moved from one part of Bupa to another.

"Many of our customers engage with different parts of Bupa — such as insurance and dental — expecting a seamless experience and a quick resolution,” says Dan Robertson, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Bupa. “To eliminate our silos and ensure we could offer the best experiences and care outcomes, we put a federated strategy in place, powered by Snowflake.”

Snowflake now functions as the core of Bupa’s data ecosystem, connecting over 50 data sources to support insurance and claims work, operations, clinical, finance and actuarial processes. These processes are the backbone of Bupa’s care efforts, powering insurance risk modeling and pricing, steering operational decision-making and putting essential patient data in the hands of the clinicians who need it.

Crucially, data is now securely and responsibly connected across Bupa’s business units. This means teams can access a complete view of a customer’s journey across previously siloed business areas.  With this joined-up insight, a more complete view of a customer’s journey is available, delivering more personalised, coordinated care while continuing to safeguard customer data with the highest levels of integrity. 

This new approach also means all parts of Bupa can use the same data platform and solutions. “Now, value is delivered where and when it’s needed,” Robertson explains. “Teams can use Snowflake to access their own data and build products to meet their needs, without the bottleneck of a central data team.”

As part of Bupa’s federated approach, teams also have access to the same scalable storage and compute power in Snowflake, as well as the platform's security, governance and data privacy features. However, all engineers have the autonomy to innovate and develop their own data products.

Bringing all this data together also empowers Bupa teams to make the most of new AI innovations that wouldn’t have been possible with the company’s legacy platform.

This creates significant opportunities for Bupa to meet its customer-centric ambitions. For example, AI can unlock the value of unstructured speech and text by turning clinician notes into structured data to inform personalized care plans. Similarly, handwritten notes or PDFs on the insurance side can be easily converted to a more usable format to accelerate vital processes — and deliver a faster, more seamless experience for customers.

For the contact center team, the potential for AI is vast. “We can move from basic interactive voice response to a smarter system that knows the customer,” Bradley explains. “That means we can cut down on tedious verification questions, while connecting every customer to the best care and treatment for their needs faster than ever.”

Bupa is already experimenting with AI for insurance fraud detection, creating chatbots and virtual assistants to empower service agents and analyzing connected data to give clinicians and care home staff a complete picture of every patient and facility.

All these data and AI use cases are creating opportunities for Bupa to accelerate operations and deliver faster, better care, such as 24/7 access to claims and treatment questions in the Bupa app. Another is making things easier for our teams so they can focus their efforts on having empathetic, personalized interactions with our customers.

One example of this new speed and agility is Bupa’s ability to ingest and process contact center data. In the past, Bupa had to ingest data from its telephone systems overnight in an 11-hour batch process that often competed for resources with other vital workloads. Now, it takes just 60 minutes to ingest these large files — a 90% reduction in processing time that helps contact center teams get better visibility and solve customer issues faster.

With Snowflake, this rapid approach to data analysis and innovation doesn’t come at the expense of security and access controls. “We’ve automated a lot of data processes, including previously manual security checks and safeguards,” Bradley says. “Now, the team benefits from role-based access linked to a robust data governance policy across all data and systems.”

Another aspect of Bupa’s customer-centric strategy is using Snowflake to improve visibility in the contact center.

“In the past, there were times when data wasn’t available and we had limits to the contact center insights we could access,” Bradley explains. “With Snowflake, we’ve been able to achieve a 15-minute batch processing time for contact center measures, so we have up-to-date insights on our customer service performance.”

This helps Bupa maintain its industry-leading net promoter score (NPS) and consistent focus on customer service excellence. With detailed, fresh insights into service performance, contact center teams can continuously improve service quality and make sure every customer gets rapid resolutions.

“The investment Snowflake is making into AI means we’re always thinking about new use cases we can develop in the AI Data Cloud,” Robertson says. 

Bupa is already looking into using Cortex AI to build AI agents that facilitate simpler data search and allow clinicians to access even more insights that help them deliver outstanding care. It’s also exploring the use of AI in summarizing patient conversations and helping offer predictive, personalized healthcare guidance to help clinicians and care-givers make the most of their valuable time.

On the contact center side, Bradley and his team plan to use AI to route calls even more intelligently and apply it throughout customer conversations to improve the way team leaders train service agents.

There are many other areas where Bupa is assessing how it can do more with its data. Wherever this innovation takes it next, the team at Bupa knows it has a platform that will keep the organization — and its data — in the best shape possible.