PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Personalizing Bupa’s Digital Healthcare Journey Using Generative AI

Bupa has quickly evolved its customer engagement story and Customer Decision Hub capabilities from outbound to digital management and surprise & delight strategies. In this session, learn how Bupa is creating personalized, relevant and rewarding experiences for their customers using Generative AI. Find out how GenAI enables them to stream consistent, real-time content through a global lens all without production bottle necks.

Transcript:

- Hey everyone, we're gonna get started here. Just wanna welcome you and thank you for attending. My name is Tara DeZao. I am the product marketing director of AdTech and MarTech for Pega Systems. I work on the customer decision hub team, and I couldn't be more excited to have Mr. Cale Urwin here from Bupa. Cale is the director of Business Capability and Health Services at Bupa. And Bupa is a global healthcare company that serves over 38 million customers. Their purpose is to help people live longer, healthier, and happier lives, and make the world better. Cale, welcome.

- Thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me, guys.

- Cale, can you get started by giving us an overview of what Bupa does, what your team does, what you do?

- Absolutely. I'm conscious that some people may know our brand, Bupa, globally. It means many things in a few different health jurisdictions across the globe, so I'll maybe take a few minutes just to contextualize our global footprint and then give a specific example of how the nuances of the Australian setting is quite different to particularly that in the US. But in speaking with a few people in the room, I know there's folks from the UK and Europe as well. So each health jurisdiction is obviously slightly nuanced. So globally, you can see, we'll just go back and I'll just cover off there. Traditionally speaking, Bupa healthcare has been a PHI-led proposition in most markets. So we have some of, if not the largest private health insurance offerings in the UK, Spain, Australia, and emerging in the Americas. And progressively over the last five or six years, we've been wrapping around provisioning services in those markets as well. And shifting from being, as I said, a traditionally PHI-led healthcare model to one that's integrated in health provisioning at its core. So it's been a big global shift for us. And then specifically within the Australia, New Zealand, or broader APAC region, I'll just maybe draw the attention to detail around the difference of our PHI product and how that links through to our provisioning services.

- [Tara] Great.

- So within the Australian market there, I've redacted some of the information just around our government services contracts. So I'll just start there. We hold the two largest healthcare contracts within the Australia and New Zealand market. We look after the Australian Defense Force and its family members. So for the American audience in the room, that's a closed network provisioning payer provider model that we run on behalf of the Defense Force. We also do the Visa medical assessments for any new Australians. And yeah, the important, particularly of the Australian economy at the minute, relying heavily on migration. We play a really important role in supporting the government with the Visa services assessments, both onshore and offshore. And then coming across to our core product and our core offering, that is health insurance. So within the different markets, PHI or private health insurance will obviously be institutionalized differently within the Australian market. It's unique in the sense that like any healthcare system in the world, the ability to fund the cost of care for your growing population is extremely challenging. The Australian government, we run a beverage. So a half public, half private system, and it has an incentivization carrot stick to take out private health insurance. So effectively, anyone earning over a certain threshold must take out private health insurance. And I say must in that if you don't, come tax time, you'll effectively pay the cost of premiums that would've been associated had you taken out private health insurance. So the government has a balancing act of trying to allow, you know, the quality of a public care setting, but also complement it with choice and control for those wanting to take out private health insurance. So the individual takes that out, separate from its employee value proposition, which is quite different. I've worked previously in the US market with Siemens Healthcare in North America. So it's individual, you choose your own product with any provider that you choose. And then furthermore, as you can see with some of our provisioning businesses that we own, you are free to consume your private health insurance product with any network. So it's not a closed network. The term "managed network" is quite a dirty term within the Australian market, and some of our clinician bases that have strong member associations are quite critical of owning end-to-end care delivery. But that is core to our strategy. We really do want to be a payer provider model, a pay via model within the Australian market. And we're quite unique in the PHI setting there that no one else has this breadth of services that we offer within the Australian market.

- Thank you Cale, for-

- Very-

- Explaining that. Regional differences in this industry. So I really appreciate the context. And I'm seeing a lot of offerings here and so can you explain some of the offerings and how they work?

- Yeah, absolutely. And I didn't touch on the second part of your question was my role. So within the APAC region, I've looked after previously customer engagement within the health insurance, so our MarTech personalization capability. And I've just recently moved into a new role where I pick up data, digital marketing, and more broadly customer engagement with call center for our provisioning businesses. So you see there, we've got Bupa Dental, which is Australia's largest dental network provider. So globally, we're also the largest global footprint as a dental provider, which is not well-known for Bupa as an organization. We also have optical and hearing, our age care facilities in both Australia and New Zealand. And that's both retirement villages and care facilities around aged care. And then within the Hong Kong market, it's a very different model altogether. It's an integrated pay vital model where we've got health centers, primary care integrated with a payer model as well. So there are some further announcements that will be coming out later this week with some further acquisitions that we've made within the Australian market. And I think the key point there is we have grown through acquisition and you'll see some of the nuance of that come out in the presentation later 'cause what comes with that is we're buying a lot of legacy in our ability to unpick that and drive customer engagement and personalization has really been a multi-year journey for us.

- Big job. Lot of complex moving parts. And to that end, you've been on a journey to sort of becoming a digitally integrated partner for your members. What has the transformation that you've been on meant for your customer engagement strategies?

- Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of compounding factors. I think COVID within the healthcare sector across all geographies had meant that the way in which traditionally care services were, you know, provisioned, consumed and engaged with change dramatically. And we certainly saw that within the Australian market. That happened to time, well, with the way in which we'd sort of stepped out our target state architecture and aligning all of our portfolio of businesses around a common customer engagement engine. We effectively started with mapping out our target state, where our gaps were across all of the various businesses and how we're gonna close those gaps. And it was end-to-end from everything to the way in which we capture our customer data, unify it, serve audiences, and enrich it with attributes and then, you know, distribute content via omnichannel. So we started with a target state architecture to be aligned across the organization, which anyone in the room in a similar position will know that's no mean feat to get that across the board. And then what followed is we started with health insurance, which was our largest organization, 4 million customers, biggest opportunity to drive value. And we went about integrating the health insurance member experience. And now as I've just touched on akin to our strategy as shifting from being a PHI-led healthcare organization, we're really expanding our care footprint. And therefore the integration of these provisioning businesses, which traditionally speaking, healthcare still does rely heavily on, you know, lagging technology and the importance of things like fax machines and the like, you know, some of the challenges that we face when we're integrating those technology estates into our target state architecture. So that's the, yeah, the three-year journey that we've been on to get to today.

- Amazing, amazing. So digital is now the channel of choice for your members. And so have you observed changes in customer behavior? You know, you have to meet really high expectations in a competitive market. So what have you observed from that?

- Yeah, I think the two biggest shifts, again, health provision can be quite traditionally focused in the way in which, you know, if I use the use case of buying private health insurance or PHI, it is particularly complex and the way in which the products are configured and the sub-component parts of what you, you know, you're claiming thresholds and your modalities of care that you can access can be quite complex. And in general, I would just say that, you know, there's information asymmetry quite broad across healthcare, but we've seen a really dramatic shift. But it certainly was multiplied by the, you know, post-COVID and digital services with telehealth offerings and the like and the uptake there. But, you know, combined with the investment and, you know, deliberate and focused investment in our target state architecture, we're seeing now, you know, upwards of 90%. And, you know, other than my legal team briefing me before today, we're pretty much close to 100% of all claims can be processed digitally.

- Wow.

- Zero touch interactions and for any PHI across the globe, that's a very mean feat to be able to be undertaking. But yeah, the combination of market dynamics post-COVID, consumption of digital offerings, the other really big uplift that we've seen is some of our personalized health propositions and the uptake there. I think there was a level of, particularly within the Australian market, a level of skepticism around consuming health through digital means. And what your data and privacy, you know, controls and permissions that were in place to protect those. So we have seen that gradually. And, you know, we're seeing, you know, north of 50% year on year engagement improvement around some of our mental health offerings.

- Oh, wow.

- And some of our, you know, Healthy Weight for Life type programs post-maternal care programs and a few of these types of offerings. So yeah, we've seen a huge shift in consumer activity, but ultimately, it's all in service of care outcomes. And we're really proud, particularly across the portfolio within Bupa, like we have some, you know, global standard NPS scores with our Bupa dental business achieving some really outstanding outcomes there. At the core of all of our offerings is great clinical care, but the way in which we've been able to augment and wrap around some of our digital experiences with things like pre and post check-ins, payment breakdown details to break down some of that information asymmetry, we're seeing some great traction with our members.

- Amazing. You mentioned COVID and I think that there was a really significant thing that you guys are doing that I think differentiates you. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, definitely. I think, again, it's nuanced to the jurisdiction that we operate within, but again, during that time of COVID, we obviously observed that members weren't able to access care and your ability to be able to use your PHI product and consume your yearly benefits before they lapsed at the end of the calendar year had resulted in a surplus that we would effectively had assumed to be deferred claims that would be resurfacing. But we've gone about over the last couple of years, giving back in excess of $1.3 billion to our members in effectively premiums that were paid for unrendered services. And, you know, the ability to be able to put that value back in the members of our hands has been critical for us. And more broadly, that approach has been adopted by, you know, the wider sector as well, returning value to members. So yeah, we're really proud of that and we've seen that it has driven tremendous retention results for us year on year.

- Absolutely. That's not something you hear every day, right?

- No.

- Returning money to the member. So this is a huge undertaking that you've been on. What are some of the big challenges that you've faced during this journey?

- Definitely, I think for anyone operating in this space and trying to push a new agenda within MarTech in any given organization. It's the challenge of trusting the data and giving up, you know, within any organization that we fasten them and the way in which portfolios are configured, there's always, you know, higher gross margin, you know, people that are maybe louder, stronger and more dominant in the way in which they're pursuing their audiences. But I think the biggest shift that we've seen, as I've mentioned on the horizon journey, once we built the foundations and we'd started to see the traction with customer engagement and the shift in the market dynamics also, of course enabled and supported that. But it then meant that we had the data to be able to support that if we are to really utilize the full potential of a product like CDH, we really do need to be collectively, we all give up for the greater good of how we can serve a greater number of propositions to tighter more hyper personalized audiences. And it's been the biggest shift, and I think anyone going on that product to customer shift, it's the biggest challenge because some of these products are billion dollar propositions that are delivering critical, you know, care and customer outcomes. And there's a great level of intensity ensuring that those, you know, customer and commercial outcomes are delivered. But I think the collective good, we've seen great success with just that shift from product to customer and trusting the data and CDH has been the key for us in unlocking that as the organization.

- So just as a marketer myself, I'm wondering if it was a hard sell to migrate from campaign marketing to one-to-one customer engagement, because sometimes, folks are kinda tied to those old ways.

- Traditional ways. Absolutely, it has. And to suggest that where by any means over the hump is, would be a fallacy. We have had to take particular stakeholders on the journey of just trusting. We don't need, you know, millions of eyeballs to serve propositions to hit a conversion number. We've basically redefined the approach for conversion through hyper targeting and the way in which we're serving always on activity that is, you know, targeting the highest propensity for offers. And when you've got a portfolio that is as far reaching as ours, we have anyone from someone seeking an age care retirement village for one of their parents through to that same individual in that demographic of life will also be supporting, you know, children going through orthodontics and the need for braces and the like. So we have a dental and an aged care business. They both compete for those same customers, but the ability to trust the propensity of what offer will resonate at the right time. We've just seen, yeah, again, CDH has been in an enormous unlock for us, and we've seen great traction in just trusting the data.

- Amazing. I love trusting the data. And now can you tell us a little bit more about some of the other goals that you started out with when you started going through this-

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Process transformation.

- So again, touching on the narrative of, you know, building the foundations and really, you know, hardening the tech and seeing the uplift in engagement, what then shifted is the ability to serve a greater number of propositions to our customer base meant there was a greater need to serve higher levels of personalization. And we saw the bottleneck within any delivery system. You'll see, like, particularly around customer engagement from ideation through to end-to-end testing and release and distribution of content into channel. That process can take time and there's certain bottlenecks. And previously, there was a bottleneck for us around test and release and your ability to deploy the levels of personalization through workflow. We've actually seen through a really exciting, you know, the Pega Lighthouse proof of concept that we had earlier this year. Rule one of three or four that were selected to participate in this. And in the application of CDH, we've actually seen that the content bottleneck, you know, the bottleneck has shifted further up the value chain to where are we able to produce enough levels of, you know, content variations and levels of personalization. So through this proof of concept, we're able to then start playing around with the Infinity product and you can see the way in which intelligent prompts can lead to greater levels of personalization. And we referenced there around the increase in velocity whilst we're still finalizing, you know, that particularly the second phase of this pilot. We've seen enormous uplift anywhere from 20 to 50% of, you know, time to market being evaporated. And that's through the idea of being able smart. And we've seen it showcased earlier today, right? And there's gonna be various other forums, but I think the thing around this one is our focus from a Bupa perspective has been around our AI strategy is if we can find operational efficiencies that then allow us to reinvest that value back into member experiences and products and propositions for our members to consume, that's where we're gonna focus our energy around AI initially. I don't think you're gonna see, you know, the healthcare market rapidly, you know, adopt AI in the way in which it's delivering services. And whilst we do have a provisioning to our portfolio, our application has really been around unlocking operational efficiencies. And we think that there's genuinely anywhere from 20 to 50% in that end-to-end content generation lifecycle. And we didn't touch on some of the other results that we'd seen around just the levels of personalization that was coming through those concepts, and then the workflows that are able to be generated off the back of it. I think that the second part to that, the second measure of success that we had was just around, you know, I think as an organization, we're quite conservative in the way in which we're approaching AI and the threat that it could present to our employees. And we very much have the mentality at Bupa of, there's two types of employees that come to work. There's those serving customers and those that are there to serve those that are serving customers. So we definitely embrace that service mentality and we wanna make sure that, you know, any of our frontline staff, if you work in a call center or you're a lifecycle marketer and you're, you know, traditionally working through, you know, content generations. We want this to be perceived as an opportunity, not a threat. And I think, you know, the survey results and the engagement that we had both from our team and also the Pega guys who I can see a few of the faces up the back of the room, I think it was overwhelmingly positive. People really perceived it to be as an opportunity to be empowered around what they could be doing.

- Sure.

- And I think, you know, the tangible components of that, when you're seeing, you know, marketeers wanting to actually access the product, get their hands into the product and start using CDH. There's always been that divide between those that are product owners or product-led from a technology perspective and traditional sort of lifecycle marketers. And to see those two worlds that come together and the level of engagement and energy that it brought for our team was really exciting. And I think that's probably the most, you know, exciting thing that we take away from the proof of concept.

- That's great. You know, marketing ops people, they're the glue that keeps things together. So that concept of the AI is really just there to augment their experience. Are you seeing that? Are people coming to you and saying, "Yes, this is actually helping me?" They're not fearful of it?

- And again, across, so if I look at my group within the marketing team, like we have anyone that's supporting, you know, healthcare episodes. So from a knee or hip care journey through to those, we have a loyalty program that serves our 4 million customers. They're very dramatically different businesses. We also run a retail operation with an optical network as well. So they're very different go-to market strategies across them and then to see that level of breadth. And we did, we piloted a few different use cases. One was centered around our general insurance products and you know, increasing a share of wallet and then also our loyalty program and that high transaction, high engagement type offering. We just saw, you know, a willingness for the marketing crew and the guys that work in that space to just open their eyes to what concepts could be produced and how and which, you know, workflows could generate different offerings for different audiences. And then when you're able to then, you know, test it through the simulator, it gives you a really, you know, strong appetite to try a few things. So yeah, that was the biggest one. We've traditionally, we run an agile delivery model where we've got a blend of, you know, a marketing lead all the way through to, you know, a testing manager and every skill set required in between. But to see, and we obviously run all the agile ceremonies centered around their missions and OKRs, but to see the level of engagement that traditionally, a marketer may not have applied to, you know, what is a workflow that's gonna be produced from Pega. They more care for what the content looks like and its look and feel. But it really generated a level of activity and excitement that we think is gonna be really cohesive for us.

- Oh, that's amazing. And you've been there since the beginning, so if you were to tell the folks here, you know, some advice going forward from the beginning of implementation to now, what's some wisdom that you can impart on our group here?

- Yeah, for sure. Probably, there's maybe two and there are a few Pega people in the room of which I can see my APJ down the bottom here. I would say be very demanding of your Pega people. And I think the turning point in our journey was we had the fortune of being able to get over to the exec center and get up to Boston, and obviously, Australia being a little island country way down below, to get up there and to just spend time with all of the guys. And you know, we had three days of just back to back sessions and you just get an appreciation for that. The second part of it is that just that the agreement and alignment around what our target state architecture was, again, tied to that trip. Part of my team that came over there was our domain architect who was critical for driving the agenda and getting alignment across the businesses to what our customer engagement target state architecture would be. And again, I can't thank the guys enough, Solen, Michelle, they spent the time at the ECB to break out or white boarding, getting the texts out and debating. So yeah, the two things I'd say is be very demanding of your Pega people and see if you can get up to the ECB 'cause it's just fantastic. The exec center experience was really transformative for us. The second part of that was just, yeah, early and often engagement around the target state architecture with all of our business stakeholders was critical for us when we got going.

- Amazing. Well, I'd like to open it up now for questions. So, does anyone here have any questions for Cale, given his complex journey? Yes, in the back,

- [Audience Member] working in the healthcare segment, meaning that you higher levels of regulatory risks. What you can share, what you can share. And especially when it comes to AI technologies. How do you mitigate the risk of you data, data sending to AI engine. Oh, thank you. How do you mitigate the risk of having to store the data or even ship it to a AI engine for some of these decisions and.

- Yeah, definitely. I'll maybe grab some time, we can get into the technical aspects of that, but I'll give the 50,000 foot level effectively we nav. So we're faced with the same regulatory requirements, particularly around PHIs. So effectively, the proof of concept we focused on was a sandbox environment limiting, you know, PII data that was entering the environment. You can see there on the slide itself, we didn't deploy the workflows in front of customers. We will graduate to that, but certainly, our experience and approach has been that we will see the maturity in the application before we're putting it in front of members. So that's the specific answer to your question. I think the second part though, and it really resonates with me when Alan had touched on it earlier this morning around a center out model. I have worked in health in North America, I've worked in health in Europe and in Australia. And I think there's gotta be a greater attitude or appetite to challenge some of the status quo because I think there's a difference between genuine regulation and business rules that we like to impose on ourselves. And then, you know, it really drives home when you hear Alan talk about when those business rules on that logic that is then embedded in core legacy. We have umping examples of how we're really challenging. And we ask the question of ourselves, is this a business rule or is this genuinely a regulatory requirement? And when you actually have that level of discussion, you find that, yeah, health insurance, we do love to trade on information asymmetry, it protects us, but part of that protection is these business rules that I think can certainly be challenged on that. But yeah, more than happy if we can go into the specifics around how we actually treated the AI.

- [Audience Member] May I ask what the biggest challenges were in rolling out Pega from a-

- Absolutely.

- Technical point of view and from a project management point of view for you?

- Absolutely. I think the biggest challenge that we've had is our organization has grown through acquisition. So undoubtedly, when you're highly acquisitive, that results in, again, the legacy technology that you're purchasing. I think there's, again, some nuance to healthcare with things like, if I take the example of our view of data, the role that a CRM plays, a CDP versus a practice management software differs greatly. And to convince even a dentist across our network to give up their favorite PMS to adopt a new one is incredibly challenging. So I think the thing, I'd just say is that we've had to challenge some of our own preconceptions around what healthcare and what a PMS needs to look like and the role of a CRM. But I think that the biggest challenge that anyone would have around particularly the application of CDH is it forces organizations. If you're genuinely gonna put up the marketing spiel that you're a customer-centric organization, you then get to the point that you have to trust the data. And if you continue to have a product-led approach that you're selling all things to all people and then that drive around share of wallet. There comes a point where CDH will provide you a true up of, you know, what is a perception and reality. And we've just really embraced what the data's provided us. I'd say that's the biggest challenges that we faced. You know, from a behavioral perspective as an organization, I think the biggest challenge that we face moving forward, and I think it would be akin to many other organizations that are, you know, operating on mature instances of CDH is just the role that data plays. And as an organization, you know, in recent years we've seen the emergence of things like CDP and a few other, you know, product capabilities that does have areas of overlap with some of CDH. But I think having a really principally driven, again, it comes back to that target state. You can use multiple products to achieve similar levels of outcomes, but if you're true to what a decisioning product should be doing, what an audience curation, you know, CDP type role would be. And then even things like, you know, real time events and enrichment of data attributes. You've gotta be really principally defined on how you treat the data because you know, the vendors may tell you land all the data here and we will do that for you. But what comes at that is the compromise of performance on the product. So yeah, the role that data plays ongoing for us will be critical to our success. And we certainly don't have the answer defined. And I don't think when you speak with any of the vendors. We're quite clear. It's just emerging so quickly, so.

- So a lot of testing and learning from things, it sounds like.

- Yeah, there's certainly an appetite within our organization. Our APAC CEO Nick Stone has a varied background and comes from different settings like retail where there's just a level of, you know, innovation and approach that he's brought to the organization. And that's really filtered its way through. So yeah, certainly challenging our risk appetite and our level of, you know, hunger to get after, you know, some of these levels of innovation that are available, so.

- Amazing. Yes, in the back.

- [Audience Member] Can you talk about the volume? For example, the interactions we're doing every month or every year, and then how are you doing managing your actions? How many actions do you have? How many week or? Can you talk a little about that?

- Yeah, so in terms of, it's varied by channel, but you saw some of the stats earlier around, you know, circa 7 million digital interactions across our app and authenticated web channels. Now we're not fully integrated to all parts of that experience yet. There's only certain parts within that, you know, journey and flow that we are integrated to. But overall, in terms of our next best action, you know, library, we have up to 140, but they're not deployed across all channels and they are use case specific. So we focused heavily around service based messaging to drive that trust and connection with members. So the sheer breadth of that is centered around things like payments, reminders, product information, quarterly value statements and things like that. So you're more traditional sort of financial services customer engagement and interaction. And on a member base of 4 million, you know, customers that we've seen great velocity in starting there, but that also bought us the trust and permission to then play with some of our broader breadth of offerings. So from an outbound channels, so EDM, SMS and the like, we'd be in excess of, you know, the multiple millions, but the predominantly service-based interactions, given the nature of, our organization. PHI still traditionally is a low transaction environment. It's a yearly product usage. You only really check it at certain times. And our shift and focus in our strategy is around we want people consuming their products and engaging with health services. So trying to drive that higher volume of interaction. But just to give yeah, some numbers around the number of next best actions that we have deployed. They're not omnichannel, so they're-channel specific, but yeah, up to 140, 150.

- You know, I was just at the Gartner conference and they were talking about personalization there and hyper-personalization and walking that fine line between over personalizing something and under personalizing it. How have you seen that play out within your own customer base? Do you ever get anecdotal feedback or things like that where you're like, you're obviously getting it right. So, you know.

- I think the biggest thing and we had this discussion at the APAC board where I was asked the question by the chairman, you know, 'cause everyone, when you think about a tool of CDH and the power of personalization, I actually think in a healthcare setting, the power of CDH is actually in the suppression list. Like when you see the offers that didn't get to market or the treatments that don't get to market, it just risks in a healthcare setting appearing tone deaf. So if someone's going through, you know, a high acuity care episode, it's probably not the time to be selling, you know, home or car insurance or trying to increase share of wallet in that space.

- Absolutely.

- So I would actually say it's hard to quantify on that. But when you, when you look at, you know, the offers and the treatments that didn't get to market and the propensity or the reasoning behind that, and we do have, you know, global marketing exclusions and specific tied to care outcomes that we would exclude customers from receiving certain offers. I actually think the biggest power is the ability to not overstep or make a wrong step in a healthcare setting. And certainly not to appear tone deaf when a member's going through, as I mentioned, you know, an acuity care setting or their child is going through. Something like that. So yeah, the ability to be clear on when not to say something and when not to engage, I actually think is the biggest power that CDH has brought to us.

- Silence and undervalued treatment. But I think that just speaks to the empathy level, you know, in addition to giving money back to your members, you're taking that context and you're reading the room, so to speak, with your personalization, which is great. Anyone else? Yes, right here.

- [Audience Member] Yes, you were talking about how you kept the trust in the data by doing reviews as such, but what kind of steps did you actually take to get the initial trust in the data? So you could actually start with the implementation.

- Yeah, so we took, there was a couple of things and it's always the political nature of organizations of where you start and which stakeholders. I think the nature for my role, I owned the outbound channels. So I had the outbound marketing channels that reported into me. So naturally that was, you know, a product like CDH, you would wanna race to the call center and integrate to the dialer IVR and see that high volume transaction. We've got there eventually over three years, but we effectively took an area where the business stakeholder, myself, was more, you know, open to the idea of the adoption of it. The second was the use cases, so focusing on less risky, high volume service-based nature interactions. And I know in the conversations I've had with CVS and the like. That was similar sort of approach. We gleaned that again from visiting the exec center. We were in certain, do we go after high value to drive that commercial return or do we demonstrate, you know, trust and confidence with customers? And we ultimately chose the latter through, you know, broader engagement within the healthcare community that Pega had been able to connect us with. So yeah, outbound channels because the stakeholder was open to the idea. The second was that, you know, service-based messaging because we felt that it was a lower risk execution for us. But believe me, if it was a return on investment, we would've started with call center and the dialer, which we've just gone live within Q2 this year and we're seeing fantastic results. So yeah. I mean, that's a nuance to any organization that you're gonna have to pick that path. But yeah, we certainly lowered our risk to see great value and a product like this with high volume and if you've got a large customer base and billions of dollars under management, like the value in even just optimizing outbound campaign activity, we found enormous unlock, so.

- [Audience Member] Did you see any use for AI tools like Blueprints? Is that something you're looking at? Do you have any other plans for where you'd like to go?

- Yeah, absolutely. So I think from a strategy perspective, Bupa, our organization will continue to really credentialize our ourselves in the space of provisioning and we wanna be known as a customer-centric healthcare. So from a provisioning perspective that'll continue to evolve for us and a greater breadth of services. What comes with that is your ability to then integrate one customer experience across so many disparate lines of clinical care. That'll be a big focus. How do we integrate these provisioning businesses into one member experience will be our focus and where we're going to next. And even, you know, my role. And the immediate focus is to see the success we've driven in health insurance expand to our provisioning businesses around customer engagement. But specifically to your question around AI, yeah, I'm beyond excited for the potential around Blueprint. The conversation we just had around how do you get a marketer, a business product line owner with, you know, commercial and customer outcomes on the line. Something like a tool, like a blueprint and this is what we saw through our use of engaging with the Lighthouse proof of concept is that it suddenly democratizes the data. And suddenly, you get to the fast play of, okay, so you disagreed with this department, this part of the journey and this treatment. Okay, well let's focus our time and energy on debunking that and tell me the nuances of a call center conversation and why that wouldn't lead to, you know, the suggested next best action or conversation topic. I just find you get to the real conversations faster and something like Blueprint, I think has got an enormous potential for organizations. 'Cause when you organizations are large as the ones that we all represent, it takes weeks to get things to an outcome and to be able to cut to the real conversation sooner, I just think is a huge unlock for organizations. So again, further operational efficiencies, I think from AI. I wouldn't however be saying Bupa and our strategy would be centered around the application of AI into things like care delivery and the like. We're probably again, gonna be centered around horizon one is operational efficiencies to reinvest into member experiences, and then the second is just uplifting our customer engagement through the application of AI, so.

- Amazing. Are you seeing the marketing function and the technology function converge a lot in healthcare? I know that we're seeing that across very many industries.

- Yeah, absolutely. And I like that horizon view there. When we set out in 2021, 2022, even just shifting to an agile delivery model where you had marketeers through to, you know, tech product owners, solution architects and you know, a tester as well, all embedded in an end-to-end delivery squad. We really just identify ourselves as customer engagement. And now with my most recent role with call center now coming a part of that, you've got end-to-end across data, digital marketing and our call centers. You've got the end-to-end customer engagement engine, which traditionally speaking in organizations, channels report up individually, which comes the challenge of how do you drive something like CDH, you know, through the organization? But yeah, we see that the identity of our marketeers and marketing and product split has really been centered around now a common identity. We're here to drive customer engagement and we all play a role in delivering those missions and OKRs.

- Love that.

- It's been really exciting, big shift for us.

- Teamwork.

- Yes.

- Any other questions here? Well, Cale, thank you so much.

- Thanks so much.

- Great conversation. Love to learn about your business and thanks for being here.

- Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much, guys.